On Wed, Sep 30, 1998 at 09:27:29PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I agree. It's too bad that he wasted time that he could have spent > finishing _The Art of Computer Programming_ on trivia like typesetting.
It's just that he realized that typesetting isn't trivia at all, but very interesting. And, IMHO, he was interested in it as an art. And furthermore, he tried some interesting Meta-ness on it, influencing a lot of geniuses (for example, Douglas Hofstadter). However, he is a mathematician, and, there was no typesetting systems for mathematicians only a few years ago. Books were written with a typing machine, and symbols added manually. Ever read some of those higher math books from the time before TeX was available? It's a pain to read them. TeX was a major relief for all scientists all over the world. And, he's still living, last time I checked, and is still working on TAOCP, very concentrated, as he says. Please see for more info: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth Marcus -- "Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@ Marcus Brinkmann http://www.debian.org master.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] for public PGP Key http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
