[tex-live] tl17 pretest init

Philip Taylor P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk
Thu Apr 20 16:50:57 CEST 2017



Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>
> It is similar to writing a book in TeX. You can put each chapter in a separate file and use \input to include them in the main file or you can put everything in a single file. It is the same in C/C++. When writing a larger program I prefer splitting the code into several files.
Yes, I can see that for project to which multiple contributors are expected, keeping each functional module in a separate file makes sense; unfortunately the naive user, coming to the project for the first time, then has no idea which file to open in order to gain an overview of the program's operation unless it is given a really obvious name (which seems not to have been done in the case of Maxwell's TeX Live interface), and this problem is exacerbated if one has no idea what the various extensions mean (".h", ".m" and so on).  When I was still an active programmer, extensions were typically three letters and intuitively obvious -- ".pas" = Pascal source, ".for" = Fortran source, ".obj" = object file, ".exe" = executable image and so on; single letter extensions really convey nothing other than to the /cognoscenti/.

** Phil.


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