[OS X TeX] Re: Macintouch report on TeX versus Word

[David B. Thompson, Ph.D., P.E., D.WRE, CFM]

On Jan 23, 2009, at 15:20, david craig wrote:

> Second, to me one of the principal virtues of TeX is that I expect  
> my tex files to be as comprehensible 100 years from now as they are  
> today. I sincerely doubt that can be said of (*shudder*) Word  
> documents, or even pdf.
>
> Vive la plain text!


I hadn't really forgotten this point. But, now that it's raised it is  
a principal reason I think plain text is a superior storage form for  
anything, data or source. I have some analyses (and data) in old  
Quatro Pro worksheets that I now have no idea how to access if I need  
them. For this reason, my colleagues and are have our rainfall-runoff  
database stored as a set of plain text files. I now use R scripts (in  
plain text) for most of my analyses.

I am confident the sources and the data will be available to me later,  
even if I change computer systems entirely.

Good point.

-=d