T sources and manual

["Anton Hartl" <unido!tumult!hartl@uunet.UU.NET>]

I have some questions and suggestions concerning the distribution of T.

1. Is it possible to build a T system without having a running one?
   We recently obtained the *sources* for T3.1 from wheaties.ai.mit.edu,
   and realized that it is not possible to build a T system solely from
   the sources.  So we had to get the vax-specific image to get a
   running T system.  Is this a bug or a feature?
   However, there are other non-{vax,appollo,sun}-sites here in
   Germany (and certainly elsewhere) interested in getting T and
   it would be nice to be able to build the system from sources.
   Bootstrapping is a fine thing, but you have to start somewhere!
   Where did the implementors of T start?
   I assume there must be some kind of T interpreter written in some 
   high level language like C (and NOT T); this interpreter could be
   ported more easily to different kinds of CPUs as a starting point
   for the complete T system.  
   Is it possible to make this interpreter available?

2. The second problem concerns the T manual.  
   The manuals we obtained are almost all in scribe format, a format
   we unfortunately are not able to deal with.  Are there T manuals in
   TeX format?  We tried the scribe2latex translator,
   but it catches only 90% of scribe directives.  Would you
   like to wade through 330KB of text to fix the remaining 10%?
   Perhaps the T manual of the distribution itself could be
   transformed to TeX format, since TeX is probably more likely
   available than scribe.



Anton Hartl 			...!uunet!unido!tumult!hartl
				hartl%tumult@unido.uucp