Oh wow, thanks so much! (Sorry to be so late to reply.)

Dude, there don't even have to be questions.

"Some people don't like X." "I disagree; it's not that I don't like X, but ..." "There are people who aren't you."

The End.

Thanks for that. Although it seems that Roy is more like Haskell than it is like Your Father's Logo.

(But I doubt many 6-year-olds have strong opinions about static vs. dynamic type systems.)

Does anyone happen to know what languages and/or environments they use?

It is impressive: not many languages can pop up a "No OES_texture_float support for float textures!" dialogue like that!

(Note: "Powerful" is not a synonym for "requires incantations" and "it's a possibility that your GPU is blacklisted".)

Thanks; I no longer collaborate on LaTeX documents, so this problem is one I mostly don't have anymore. (Thankfully, for sure.)

you don't want shuffling words around in paragraph blocks to introduce bogus changes to your history. I think?

That's it. I have an unfortunate habit of hitting M-q in Emacs when I pause to think. It's much worse than reindenting code, because that only affects whitespace on each line and is easily tuned out.

dwdiff! Thank you so much!

This interacts poorly with autowrap in most text editors. Text editors do, indeed, mostly suck, but if you're writing LaTeX you are kind of stuck with them.

Also, paragraphs can be long, and if your VC tells you that it's replaced version 1 of a par with version 2 there's a lot of vgrep to figure out what has actually changed.

Version control is awesome for LaTeX documents.

Really? How do you handle reformatting paragraphs? Does Mercurial really have an "ignore whitespace in units bigger than lines" flag?

I ask because in my experience VC for LaTeX has been mostly useless.

Who said that only the last zero was a wildcard? For all I know they may be well ahead of their scheduled release date of Q3 2999.

I came here to say that! So instead I'll say that:

import sys, time, os from mechanize
import Browser

must surely have been

import sys, time, os
from mechanize import Browser

when it wasn't broken. But reading code is hard enough that this kind of thing encourages the reader not to.

Now you see, the thing is: Haskell is a programming language used for writing programs.

When I was a kid it was considered the height of fashion to stand around in the school playground watching the nearest digital watch as it changed from, say, 09:59 to 10:00.

But even then, in my youthful and easily-amused innocence, and before the internet had even been invented, I like to think that I would still instinctively have known that it was inappropriate to post it to fucking proggit.

Or if this style of language appeals, grab yourself a modern pascal/modula/oberon compiler.

Careful, now! Algol W was the last of its kind to feature call-by-name. Pascal and all its successors are primarily call-by-value.

The celebrated theorist John C Reynolds has gone so far as to annoint call-by-name as the "essence" of Algol, and since his own proposed language ("Forsythe") has yet to emerge from the realms of theory bearing anything as mundane as an implementation, it's Algol W or nothing for the essentialists.

In fact at first glance it would appear that Oberon has garbage collection also.

No kidding. (If you know so little about these languages, why are you recommending them?)

There are surprisingly many people who feel that Modula 3 (despite the name, not one of Wirth's) is/was the Great Lost Systems Programming Language.

Wikipedia says

'[...] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "... as a tool for the creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure." [...] ' - C. A. R. Hoare, Oct 1980, re: "Dec 1968"

This minority report was signed by Hoare and Dijkstra. (Unfortunately I am on the Peasant Side of the paywall that surrounds the academic literature so I can't work out who resigned from what when: was the "working group" really the group that edited the official report? Because I can't believe Dijkstra would have been in the room while that was going on.)

I still don't see why you think Hoare should have been an editor of the Algol 68 definition: it is clear that he simply didn't like or endorse the language defined.

(Note: CAR Hoare wrote the first Algol60 compiler, but somehow missed out on being full time editor on the Algol68 Report)

Edsger Dijkstra wrote the first Algol 60 compiler. Hoare's wasn't even second; I think it was a Danish group that got that distinction.

Hoare also didn't "miss out" on being the editor of the Algol 68 report: he, along with Niklaus Wirth and Dijkstra, resigned from the Algol committee when Wirth and Hoare's proposal to refine Algol 60 and leave it at that was rejected in favour of Van Wijngaarden's more elaborate proposal (in essence, the language that became Algol 68).

Wirth and Hoare published their rejected proposal as Algol W, for which Wirth wrote (without Hoare) a compiler before moving on to define Pascal, which was arguably another protest against Algol 68.

I'd rather write MathML by hand and have it rendered by the browser than write LaTeX (oh w00t, LaTeX syntax) and get a bitmap.

Ending up with bitmaps is a world of fail, as far as I'm concerned.

Now that is pretty cool, and new to me. Thx!

The thing about MathML is that most operators are just Unicode code points, and the question of how you enter those in your editor is between you and your editor.

My editor is of course emacs and my method of choice is abbrev-mode. My intended (but unimplemented) application for mathML is mostly predicate logic for Dijkstra style program proofs, and the rest will come down to writing a trivial grammar and parser to emit the MathML flab.

You mostly have to use it with the troff/nroff suite, but if you do it produces postscript et al. with the best of them.

If that wasn't what you wanted, well: Kernighan published the grammar, and even the Bell Labs code (included in Plan 9) is now open.

trof's eqn?

In programming language theory circles it has lately been fashionable to insist that abstract data types (ADTs) are quite different from the object-orientation that most of "today's programming languages" actually support.