But perhaps is better to write a program for making easier the writing of usable postscript files.
Postscript, a real programming language, is much more expressive than dvi files. With it you can not only write text, but also draw. Since decades there are printers that understand directly postcript (MacWriter was the first and had a more powerful processor than the Mac). Ghostscript translates postscript to other languages of other printers. There is a lot of support for postscript files (viewers).
I don't know, either DVI or PS. It is the same for me.
DVI looks binary so far, from pdftex --output-format=dvi....
Actually the most important is the number of library dependencies related.
The less libraries and dependencies, the better. None, just clang and VT ANSI would be ideal
I think that first was PS, and DVI came after.
PostScript (PS) is a page description
language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing business. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming
language and was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984.
PS and DVI were born at almost same time.
DVI looks to me to need to create binary. PS looks more markup language - readable.
PS is hard to make - long for a single page with hello world.
DVI is much smaller, just hello world.
man tex
actually /usr/local/bin/tex is the main file, which might make dvi.
echo "\font\tenrm=cmr10 \tenrm M \bye" > test.tex
tex test.tex
Smaller and smaller ...
Just 20 Mb....
What's into tex binary?
...
As said web2c will make the tex binary.
web.ch is the interesting file.
"Web2C is an implementation of TeX and friends which translates the original WEB sources written by Donald Knuth into C, so they can be readily compiled on modern systems.
Kpathsea is a library providing path searching and other common functionality that Web2C and other programs use."
Example of binaries:
http://mirrors.ctan.org/systems/os2/web2c-6.1/binary/web2c.zip
It seems:
weave tex.web
and then compiling the file with tex or pdftex. The program code is obtained by running
tangle tex.web
that produces tex.p.
"TeX is written in simplified pascal (like C no procedure definition inside procedures), but a pascal dialect for which there is now compiler. web2c converts this pascal to C, but is bloated with a package called kpathsea: it is not like translated knuths original."
Actually a just rewrite of main binary "tex" in C , like tex.c , would do it - and it would avoid all scripting (web2c, ... pl,...).
Is that right?