[texhax] Latex: dumbing down? (fwd)

[Victor Ivrii]

On 8/27/06, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Victor Ivrii wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Still, I am afraid that the fate of Plain TeX is sealed (no
> > indexing/automatic numbering capacities)
>
> A strange misconception : Plain TeX can very easily
> perform those tasks -- the only obstacle (a very small
> one, IMHO) is that it does not do them "out of the box".
> That is, it requires a small amount of work on the part
> of the user to implement the functionality that he/she
> desires.  Indeed, if I may deliberately mis-quote Reinhard
> Kotucha :
>
>         "No, there is absolutely nothing you can do in
>          LaTeX that you can't do in Plain TeX."
>
> :-)
>
> Philip Taylor
>

Well, the absolute majority of people cannot reliably perform the task
right out of the box. And majority is very reluctant to learn anything
new. The majority of grad students use preamble of LaTeX files they
found in their supervisor paper and this is the preamble which the
latter got from his own supervisor :-(

On 8/27/06, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>     > Still, I am afraid that the fate of Plain TeX is sealed (no
>     > indexing/automatic numbering capacities)
>
> What?  Eplain has existed for many years precisely to do such things.
> http://tug.org/eplain

I am sure you are right and I apologize for the wrong statement. The
problem is that an absolute majority of users believe in this.  And I
am afraid that eplain is not much used. Again "God is always on the
side of the big battalions".
-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii