> It would be very regrettable if the many hours and great deal of knowledge > that have been put in these programs would be lost because it is locked up in > a programming language that nobody knows any more. > > With a port to Lua (or Perl, Python, Ruby), I see as the main advantages from > the language itself: easier string handling, dynamic array sizes, hash tables.
If you master any of these languages, you'll understand Pascal and Fortran as easily. And what is not obvious can be looked up in the manual. What really takes time is understandig the sources of a program you don't have written and maintained over "time of growth" yourself. Would you want to maintain or port any program in the chain we are talking about, that would be the most time consuming part, not the lack of being familar with the used programming language. If there isn't a point like "you can't do this and that in the employed language", there's no need to port a (very well) running software to some "more modern" language. You're most probably just going to sweep different sort of dirt under different places of the rug. The rest ist queston of taste. best regards Bernhard ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
