Re: TeX syntax?

Allan Adler <ara@nestle.csail.mit.edu> wrote:
>glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:


>> > Knuths TeX book is an abomination, describing lexing and parsing as
>> > mouth, gullet and stomach nonsense.


>Knuth's TeX Book is a manual for using TeX. It is a wonderful book.
>It is volume A of a 5 volume work whose volumes are:
>A. The TeX Book
>B. TeX the Program
>C. The METAFONT Book
>D. METAFONT the Program
>E. Computer Modern Typefaces


I had no patience for any of these books. On the other hand, The Art of
Programming is excellent.


Anyway, I learned TeX with these:


Rayond Seroul's and Silvio Levy's "A Beginners's Book of TeX"
(ISBN-0-387-97562-4, and ISBN-0-540-97562-4) and David Salomon's "The
Advanced TeXbook" (ISBN-0-387-94556-3).


I made my own preprocessor/format for TeX based on these books. I
remember playing a lot of games with the macro name space. For
example, only a limited character set can be used in macro names, but
I wanted to use any character. I ended up escaping: AA maps to A, AB
maps to backslash, AC to {, etc.


--
/* jhallen@world.std.com AB1GO */ /* Joseph H. Allen */
int a[1817];main(z,p,q,r){for(p=80;q+p-80;p-=2*a[p])for(z=9;z--;)q=3&(r=time(0)
+r*57)/7,q=q?q-1?q-2?1-p%79?-1:0:p%79-77?1:0:p<1659?79:0:p>158?-79:0,q?!a[p+q*2
]?a[p+=a[p+=q]=q]=q:0:0;for(;q++-1817;)printf(q%79?"%c":"%c\n"," #"[!a[q-1]]);}

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