[tex-eplain] Does xeplain.tex still exist?

[Dan Luecking]

At 05:53 AM 6/16/2009, Jim Diamond wrote:

>P.S. I often wonder whether in this day and age it is worthwhile
>having two versions of a file, one with comments and one without.
>While Knuth did a lot of bit-pushing type optimizations to reflect the
>computing power of 1980, I think that in 2009 there is likely more
>(human) time spent maintaining two versions of files then will be lost
>by having TeX occasionally read and discard the comments in a complete
>source file.

If my understanding is correct, there is no maintaining of
two versions. The stripped version is generated by a script
(mkdist-merge) from the commented files. The separate files
that make up eplain are also stand-alone macro files: merging
them is the main point and stripping comments while doing so
is just a side benefit.

Regards,
Dan


Daniel H. Luecking
Department of Mathematical Sciences
University of Arkansas
"Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum" --Descartes