Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01
I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:
- 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”.
- infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.
In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.
But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.
On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in
I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:
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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!”
[Wayback/Archive] GTv89dwWsAM05wM.jpg (552×639)
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ffmpeg, History, ImageMagick, LaTeX, pandoc document converter, Power User, Typesetting | Leave a Comment »
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