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[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <ss9ba0$vb7$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> DCL, FORTRAN, C, and some other common OpenVMS programming languages 
> just aren't very good at strings.

I used to write presentations by hand on transparencies.  Then I did 
them in LaTeX and printed them out on transparencies (for overhead 
projectors).  Then I displayed the PDF produced from LaTeX via a 
projector.  Then I added the functionality to build up a slide bullet 
point by bullet point (by using the \include command in LaTeX; no 
content is present more than once in the source code).  I had seen other 
people do that but had no idea how it was done (probably similar to how 
I do it: multiple pages, and each page has one more point than the 
previous one).  Then I added the full pages after the transparencies.  
That makes it easy to "go back to slide 5"; I've seen so many people 
paging through their entire presentation line by line.  My guess is that 
PowerPoint or whatever could do that as well, but strangely I've rarely 
if ever seen it.

Then---drumroll, please---I moved from writing the LaTeX by hand (from 
templates, of course), with all the \include commands, to writing a 
normal LaTeX document which is then PARSED BY A DCL SCRIPT to create 
usually several hundred pages of LaTeX source.  

Later I added the possibility to add a header or footer to each slide, 
also via the DCL script.

I have seen DCL procedures with tens of thousands of lines.  :-)