On 2021-09-08, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > I spent close to 20 years (80s-90s) maintaining the /output/ of such > a preprocessor.
Ouch. I hope it paid well. ;) Back when I did a lot of TeX/LaTeX stuff on VMS, I used to make occasional fixes and add (very minor) features to one of the dvi handling executables (I don't remember if it was the VT2xx previewer, or the laser-printer "driver") using the VMS "PATCH" utility. I also can't remember how we ended up without source code for that piece of the toolchain when we build all of the reset of it from source. > The software had apparently originated with a sub-contractor, and we > did not have access to their preprocessor Allowing that to happen is definitely a major management F*%k-up for which somebody should have had their career ended. > (and/or no one ported it to the VAX-11 from PDP-11). I would have though that would have been pretty trivial compared to maintaining the output source for 20 years. -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
