[Groff] Re: OT: Bloat.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

> xemacs is pretty large, but not bloated. Its largeness consists of
> useful stuff -- well, stuff that's useful for somebody, somewhere.

That doesn't seem a great definition.  The Jargon File says

    bloatware n. [common] Software that provides minimal functionality
        while requiring a disproportionate amount of diskspace and
        memory.  Especially used for application and OS upgrades. This
        term is very common in the Windows/NT world. So is its cause.

> There are *real* users out there who want to edit weird text (such as
> 'Latin' COMAL -- see
> http://www.interlingua.dk/historia/diverse/intercomal-1.htm ). So
> large does not equal bloated. MS Office is bloated because it's
> stuffed full of huge amounts of non-useful stuff.

Aren't your views on Emacs and Word subjective?  Who's to say that there
isn't one just person who finds feature X in Emacs useful, and one who
finds feature Y in Word useful?

> Someone once reported that there are huge chunks of binary code in a
> standard installation that never gets called.

Ditto Emacs WRT .el files.

> The test for bloat vis a vis groff is whether it gets more useful as
> it gets bigger

I don't think I can agree given my comments above.

> and if it can still run in its most minimalist form on machines dating
> back to the days of Babbage.

Ah, the Babbage Bloat test  ;-)

Cheers,


Ralph.