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Date:         Sat, 17 Oct 1998 11:49:11 +0100
From: Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK>
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Subject:      Re: Users dropping into TeX
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> In <199810161313.OAA30490@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle <davidc@NAG.CO.UK> writes:
> >  LaTeX evidently has a syntax based on Pascal, but this syntax is not
> >  explicitly part of LaTeX, only something that the developers of LaTeX use
> >  internally
>
> >I think you are probably referring to the pascal-ish comments that were
> >in the sorces for latex209 and some remain in the `oldcomments' sections
> >in the current sources. Leslie Lamport used those while designing the
>
> <nitpick>
> AFAIK it is not pascal-ish, but classic algol68-like pseudocode. :-)
> </nitpick>

frankly, whatever the pseudocode looks like (and wirth would once have
been apoplectic to have pascal-like and algol68-like confused ;-), i
think hans aberg's original suggestion is just plain wrong.

latex's syntax has a little bit of regularity, a little bit of block
structure, ..., but all told it's so uneven that it's silly to imagine
`formally' specifying it.

added to which, the extreme difficult of faulting tex primitives,
etc., that fall outside the scope of the syntax makes the utility of
such a specification doubtful.

robin