Hans Hagen wrote:
well, one way of reading davids remark is
"there are folks out there who try to reason and talk on behalf of Don Knuth without knowing his real opinions"
Yes. That's why I quoted Don Knuth (and gave a reference, and did not mix in my own view). In October this year David Kastrup posted to comp.text.tex === I mean, Knuth himself talks all the time about "TeX" and actually uses pdfTeX most of the time. === http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/5b6a876b... I asked him how he knew that, and he did not reply. This seems to me be be an example of the 'lazy (mis)-representation' of Don Knuth that your paraphrase of David criticizes. David: Please tell me (off list if you wish), how you know that Knuth uses pdfTeX most of the time.
actually i've heard Don say (at an ntg QA session long ago) that he was surprised that there were no more fundamental extensions like pdftex (at that time upcoming); also, there is a difference between (say) 2^4 fundamental different tex variants and 2^32 confusingly slightly unsimilar ones
Hans: I'm looking at the transcripts (in Digital Typography) and I think you're referring to the CS TUG session (pages 617-8) and not the NTG session. Hans: Your comment has two parts, separated by an 'also'. Just to clarify, the first part is your paraphrase of Don Knuth and the second part (so far as I can tell) comes just from you, and not at all from Don Knuth. No need for anyone to reply to this (except David K, off-list if he wishes). -- Jonathan