rounding problems

[Rebecca and Rowland]

>Well, if I was going to do it over again I'd use perl, but it's too late
>now...

I for one am very glad you used TeX, not Perl.  Perl is far too
system-dependent for my liking: fontinst written in TeX `just works'.  By
contrast, the vfinst Perl scripts don't work on my Mac at all, despite me
having MacPerl.

> At the time I needed a language with good scripting facilities, and
>TeX's macro language looked quite reasonable.  And it means it runs on any
>TeX-aware site (blah blah usual advertizing stuff here).

That feature alone is worth all the hassle with TeX's eccentric way of
doing arithmetic.

[snip]

>» For anyone who's wondering why the code does this in the first place,
>it's
>» because otherwise you get overflow errors by multiplying a dimen by a
>» scalefactor > 1000 (TeX doesn't support fp multiplication, you have to
>» multiply by an int then divide by another int).
>
>That's one of TeX's features that make me sometimes wonder whether TeX
>was
>really the language of choice for a software like fontinst...

What amazes me about TeX is that someone like Knuth could write something
that's as bad at arithmetic as TeX is.

Rowland.