1. TeX
An extremely powerful macro-based text
formatter written by Donald E. Knuth, very popular
in the computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced Unix
troff, the other favored formatter, even at many
Unix installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural)
pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with
the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case ‘TeX’ is
considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to
proliferate names from the word ‘TeX’ — such as TeXnician
(TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX
programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. See also
CrApTeX.Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining
quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monumental
Art of Computer Programming (see
Knuth, also bible). In a
manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once
and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought
he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8
years. The language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of
The Art of Computer Programming is not expected to
appear until 2007. The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such
that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started
as a bit of toolsmithing on the way to something
else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander scale than most. TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but
high-quality software. Knuth offers a monetary award to anyone who found
and reported bugs dating from before the 1989 code freeze; as the years
wore on and the few remaining bugs were fixed (and new ones even harder to
find), the bribe went up. Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so
full of cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least
one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.
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Definitions of TeX
