Re: tlug: Office suite for use under Linux

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> writes:

> TeX is Turing complete.  (Of course, the recent rash of
> Word viruses is proof that so is Word, I guess.  Never heard of a TeX
> virus.  Have you? :-)

At the Birmingham conference of the TeX User's Group in ? about ?
1992 or so ? the coordinator of the NTS (New Typesetting System)
project gave a presentation in which he raised the question of
modifying the TeX source (which would then no longer be called
TeX, per Knuth's much earlier closing words on the subject), to
provide an OS-level hook.  This could then be used to convertify
graphics files and delete stuff and generally screw up your
system.

The concensus in the end, if I remember correctly, was that this
would be a bad idea, precisely because it would open the door to
OS level viruses embedded in TeX documents or style files.

Cheers,
-- 
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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