[texhax] (no subject)

[Stewart C. Russell]

Herbert Gintis wrote:
> 
> ... the language he wrote it in is a complete mess. ...  the
> absence of real floating point

you don't want floating point in typesetting software. The tiniest 
precision difference can make a line break differently, which can make a 
page throw differently, which can wreck the pagination of a whole book.

I worked with a couple of homebrew, in-house book pagination systems. 
Both of them used floating point, and both had to be run on the one 
processor from start to finish to ensure consistent proofing.

  Stewart