The Quirk

We begin our reading of Literate Programming, by Donald Knuth.

For those who had to skip this meeting, we completed up to paragraph 2 on page 98. We will recommence in a fortnight at the line “Document formatting languages are newcomers to …”.

In answer to a query: Wikipedia informs me that LaTeX is a set of macros for the underlying TeX language. A macro is a procedure that modifies the text of a file. Thus the LaTeX program allows you to write directives into your document (e.g. \documentclass), which will then be translated by the LaTeX macros into the more basic TeX code. I was wrong to say that Knuth invented LaTeX – he invented TeX. LaTeX, with its increased functionality, was invented by Leslie Lamport. I can only assume that the “La” is for “Lamport”!

The ‘illiterate’ pascal files we saw at the start of the session can be seen here.