Why TeX?

[Ralph-Diether Marzusch]

In article <47800025 at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>, mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>     Finally, for those totally unfamiliar with it, TeX is a computer
> language, not a word processor. It is fair to say that you "program"
> your book. 

True. That's why I don't like TeX. It's like an assembly language -
you have to know the machine very well to understand all those error
messages. Macro packages like LaTeX help, but you are still using an
assembler and get very low level error messages. I'd like to write text
using some higher level (and less powerful) text programming language and
use a *compiler* that converts my text to plain TeX and gives me high level
error messages only.

Nroff/Troff are not much better, but at least they make use of preprocessors
that *compile* math input, tables or pictures.

Ralph-Diether Marzusch
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