Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: tex82 or ctex2.9?
Message-ID: <11071@sol.ARPA>
Date: 5 Jul 88 07:45:00 GMT
References: <17268@gatech.edu>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 24

|Which is better to use, the original TeX82 in pascal from Stanford, or
|ctex2.9?
|
|By better, i mean things like speed, public domain driver support, stability
|(bugs per square inch ;'}), etc.

All TeXs generate the same DVI format so a driver will work equally
well (or badly) with any TeX.

Unix TeX now comes with WEB to C so Pascal is no longer needed. It
passes the trip test on the most common Unix boxes. It is about 20%
faster than the Pascal version.  The advantage of this version is that
it can track bug fixes in the original WEB code as and when Knuth
announces them.

Ctex 2.9 is claimed to pass the trip test and I could be convinced it
does on the original machine, a PC. However I couldn't get it to pass
trip on my Sun.

Whenever TeX is ported to a new machine, it must be validated by the
trip test, because the test not only exercises the particular
translation but also the compiler system.

	Ken