Joseph Oswald wrote:
Thanks for your quick response to my e-mail. Most of the errors you refer to are well-localized in Knuth's source, and are part of the program that is meant to be modified to suit the particular platform that is being ported to. Once the WEB system is bootstrapped, each of the issues except for the for-loop one is a one-line change in the original source. At least in this respect, Knuth had the foresight to allow his programs to survive for what is a very long time in computer terms!
I agree. However, I'd have preferred if the compiler/system dependent parts were put in a separate file so they could be changed more easily and shared between projects (e.g., many of the issues of Web and TeX are the same).
However, on the for loop issue, I can see no practical advantage to enforcing this point of the standard to the point of not compiling the program. Can this aggressive behavior possibly be restricted to a --pedantic mode? I.e., can the error be demoted to a warning unless a --pedantic mode is enabled?
OK, I'll turn it into a warning unless one of the standards is selected (or `-Werror' given, of course).
Gale Paeper wrote:
With some 'net seaching, I found a location with a set of "master files personally by Donald E. Knuth" at ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/. In that file set, there are change files with comments like "Change file for GNU Pascal and Linux".
I had looked there ... OK, found it now (didn't see initex.ch before).
Never having worked with Web and TeX code before, I don't know how much help those files will be in fixing the problems but it does seem to have a some promising potential.
I suppose so. Knuth himself reported two GPC bugs in Apr 2000 on this list when he made the files.
Unfortunately they refer to GPC internals (via ext.h) which have changed since then. I suppose it shouldn't be too hard to rewrite it all using the facilities in the GPC module. (And the result will then probably not be Linux-specific, but work on all GPC targets.)
Frank