infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/10
Cover of “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, 2nd edition”, Published by Addison-Wesley Professional (June 30, 1994) © 1994, authored by Leslie Lamport
LaTeX was slightly later than the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
So what is LaTeX?
Where Donald Knuth created the typesetting program TeX (visually TeX), Leslie created a set of macros for it, later named LaTeX (visually LaTeX) and wrote the first (still famous) book – cover on the right – on it: [Wayback/Archive] LaTeX: A Document Preparation System by Leslie Lamport, second edition, printed in 1994 back then by Addison-Wesley (now Pearson Education, subsidiary of Pearson plc) with ISBN 9780201529838.
It’s gimmick was at page 252, inside the index referring “infinite loop” to page 252 itself.
Many people keep posting screenshots of the page without referencing where it is from. That’s a bit sad, as these gimmicks are an important part of history where programming books were as much about explaining features of computing environment, as well as explaining underlying concepts like recursion.
So this 2024 post finally made me write this blog post: [Wayback/Archive] vx-underground on X: “HELP!”
Which brings be back to the index of Leslie’s LaTeX book: since it has been around for such a long time, there are many PDF copies of the book on-line. Onf of them is (or maybe at the time you read this: was) at [Wayback/Archive] www.cs.ntua.gr/~sivann/books/LaTeX%20-%20User%27s%20Guide%20and%20Reference%20Manual-lamport94.pdf from which I made this screenshot:
[Wayback/Archive] 353603420-4256fdbc-6d53-4411-8b20-1c2fc898982b.png (664×879)
Back to LaTeX itself
LaTeX has gained a lot of popularity in the last 30 years, not limited to the academic world. It is for instance used as an intermediate format for many document conversion systems (yup, many of those web-sites that do conversion of formats depend on tools like this, or – for multi-media like audio, imaging and video – FFmpeg and ImageMagick, but also many command-line tools – for instance Pandoc – use this in the background).
Besides the versatility of LaTeX, it is also known for the longevity of both itself and the documents created with it: if you take a 40 year old LaTeX document, it will still render. Of course modern LaTeX will warn you such a document is old, but the rendering still looks great. Compare that to many other word processing or typesetting systems (hello Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker, Ventura, QuarkXPress, InDesign, Publisher).
The book is still in the top 5 of LaTeX books (see [Wayback/Archive] 20 Best LaTeX Books of All Time – BookAuthority), but by now there are many more resources, two of which are:
- [Wayback/Archive] Documentation – Overleaf, Online LaTeX Editor
- [Wayback/Archive] tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf: The Not So Short Introduction to LᴬTᴇX (Or LᴬTᴇX in 280 minutes) [Wayback PDF view/PDF view] which is also available from:
- [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – oetiker/lshort: The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX
- [Wayback/Archive] CTAN: Package lshort
Lshort started as a translation and rationalisation of a ground-breaking German-language introduction to LaTeX. It has since taken on a momentum of its own, and has itself been translated into a number of languages. Thus we have introductory text available to a wide proportion of the user community. The archive holds versions in Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian and Vietnamese.
- [Wayback/Archive] Tobi Oetiker – Tobi Oetiker’s Toolbox (of MRTG, smokeping and RRDtool fame) -> [Wayback/Archive] Index of /lshort always has the most recent PDF build.
Query: [Wayback/Archive] LaTeX: A Document Preparation System by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994. – Google Search
--jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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