It's often tempting, but usually an error, to allow control signals to
be sent by the same channel as the data. This is an example of why.
When I changed my name I had no intention of becoming
Little Bobby Tables. I simply wanted to move
from a form which people consistently got wrong to a form which people
would still get wrong, but in ways that might amuse me. I must now
regard that as a success, since this letter from the Free Software
Foundation reveals a problem:
…because, in TeX, an underscore character introduces a subscript (and
in whatever the FSF has built on top of it apparently italics too).
Knuth assumed that if anyone wanted to use a literal underscore in a
TeX document it would be escaped with a backslash. Which is fine when
you're composing the material yourself, not so good if you're
importing a list of names from non-TeX sources. (Yes, this one's
harmless. What if there'd been a backslash in the source text,
followed by typesetting commands? And if they wanted to represent my
name correctly, they'd have to insert a backslash in front of the
underscore.)
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