Re: DocLang

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <[email protected]> Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:54:56 -0000 (UTC)

Newsgroups	comp.misc
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:41:06 -0400 (EDT), Scott Dorsey wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:35:52 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:17:43 -0400 (EDT), Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>
>>> Why can't people just use TeX markup like God and Knuth intended?
>>
>> Because troff came first.
>
> troff was just an updated runoff. TeX was a different order of
> magnitude; it was up with commercial typesetting systems like Xics.

troff appears: 4th ed Unix, 1973
<https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=systems:4th_edition&s[]=troff>.
Originally designed for the CAT phototypesetter from 1972
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff>.

TEX -- didn’t come out till 1978, if I recall rightly.