EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) (08/30/88)
In article <4998@claris.UUCP>, drc@claris.UUCP (Dennis Cohen) writes: > >Wasn't TeX originally written is SAIL? I seem to remember some reference to >it in the Pascal sources that I saw many years ago at JPL (gads, that seems >like a lifetime ago -- working on Univac 1100s, IBM 3032s, ModComps and VAXen). > >Dennis Cohen Dennis, Knuth writes (Ref. 1) that "a complete version of TEX was designed and coded by the author in late 1977 and early 1978; that program, like its prototype, was written in the SAIL language, for which an excellent debugging system was available". When I was with Bell-Northern Research in the early 80s, the DEC-20 systems programmers thought very highly of SAIL. The following book is highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn how to write insanely great code and comments. Ref: Donald E. Knuth, T X, the Program. Reading, MA, 1986: Addison- E Wesley Publishing Company. p. 2.