somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
> "Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote
> > somebody wrote:

> > > I wouldn't say that. Like most *nix utils, tar has its idiosyncracies.

> > Actually, it sucks pretty badly for manipulating actual tape archives,
> > when you get right down to it.

  The tar *program* maybe, but manipulating the tar *format* is just a
question of selecting the program you like. I'm sure there are many
advanced and GUI'ed programs which can handle tar (and other) formats
in multitude of ways.

> The problem in academia/*nix world is a bit of idol worship and inertia. I
> had to use TEX/LATEX again the other day. Great concept for its day (and
> even for today) and it still works of course, but what a mess and PITA. It
> needs a major rewrite to bring it into the 21st century. Being not buggy and
> predictable (for those with an intimate knowledge of its inner workings, at
> least) is not the same as being "incredibly well designed" - especially
> after 5-10 years in the software business.

  One advantage of LaTeX over most other text editing software is that its
input is ascii text. This makes it relatively easy to write programs which
generate LaTeX files and then let LaTeX handle the nice formatting.

  Of course not many appreciate this, not even many programmers who are
tasked to create a program which produces visually-pleasing documents.
One of the easiest way of doing this is, by far, make the program output
a proper LaTeX file, rather than trying to use some obscure library or,
heaven forbid, try to create the PDF/PS itself (which is really *not* worth
the programming trouble).

  Could the LaTeX input format be improved? Sure. However, it has worked
for a couple of decades, and usually the principle is "if it works, don't
fix it".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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