[texhax] (no subject)

[Herbert Gintis]

At 09:47 AM 6/7/2003 +0100, Chris Rowley wrote:
>Michael
>
>I agree with everything you said, but especiallly this bit:
>
> > Not least of Knuth's contributions is that of making his
> > program public (not only public, but he went to considerable effort to
> > make it as accessible as possible).
         I totally agree that it is an unbelievable coup that Knuth's 
software of the 1970's survives to this day and remains quite excellent. 
However, the language he wrote it in is a complete mess. All the 
\expandafters and \csnames and Lord knows what crazy commands, the absence 
of real floating point, horrible debugging instruments, not 
object-oriented, etc. I really hate to hack this code, and would love it if 
TeX were completely rewritten in C++, Delphi, or Java conforming to modern 
programming conventions.
         By the way, I have always found it curious that Knuth is such a 
great computer theorist and a quite good mathematician, but his computer 
code (e.g., from his multi-volume book on computer algorithms, or his web, 
tangle, weave, etc.) is really quite awkward and highly inelegant. A good 
computer program should look like a haiku poem, not a tangle of 
impenetrable code, IMHO.

Best,

Herb



Herbert Gintis
Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of 
Massachusetts
External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM
15 Forbes Avenue, Northampton, MA 01060
413-586-7756  (Home Office) 206-984-9873 (Fax)
Recent papers are posted on my <http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis>web site.
Get Game Theory Evolving (Princeton, 2000) at 
<http://www.isbn.nu/0691009430/amazon>Amazon.com.

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