[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 01:16:42PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> Oh sure, but I didn't mean in the sense of code, but rather,
> philosophically and design-wise. Both seem to be influenced by Scribe's
> idea of separation of content and presentation (an idea reinvented a decade
> later in HTML+CSS).

Funny, Marc Donner, then at Morgan Stanley, was sort of a mentor of mine.
One day I was discussing with him all the stuff I had done with *roff
-ms input, I have scripts to make html slides out of that, another that
makes a web site with a site map.

I told him that I really liked it but wasn't sure why.  He said "You
like it because that macro packages says what to do without exposing
how.  That makes it easy to write scripts to spit out in some other
format".  True dat.