Use of Latex

[Chris Lindblad <CJL@reagan.ai.mit.edu>]

I have received quite a few letters from people interested in running TeX, but
not interested enough to shell out $3000 per machine to Symbolics (for Pascal)
to run it. Most of the letters have been going like this:

    Date:    Fri, 5 Jun 87 09:16:18 PDT
    From:     TAYLOR%PLU@ames-io.ARPA

    Chris -
    Does Latex required that Symbolics Pascal be loaded while running or
    that just the Latex Pascal source be compiled, one time, with Symbolics
    Pascal and the resultant .bin files be loaded?

    Apparently it costs $3k/machine (no site license) for Symbolics Pascal
    which we do not have on our 7 Symbolics 36xx.


Currently, the way Symbolics Pascal works, you need to load the entire Pascal
system in order to run any Pascal program, even though a very small subset of
the stuff loaded is used. In my opinion, the way things 1should0 be is that the
Pascal system should only be necessary for compiling and debugging Pascal
programs, and either the standard world load or an essentially-free runtime
support system be all that's need to run Pascal programs like TeX.  Symbolics
hasn't done this, probably because of lack of demand.  However, I'll bet that
if there is sufficient demand for essentially-free runtime support for their
non-lisp languages, like a lot of people wanting to run TeX, the situation
could change.