alt Hacker NewsThis mirrors my experience.
It's worth noting that TeX was developed in the same time period that the details of lexical scope were being nailed down by Guy Steele in the Rabbit compiler for Scheme. It's not that TeX is an ad hoc system; it's more the case that people didn't actually know how to implement a better system at the time.
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amszmidt • today at 4:41 AM
The details of lexical scope where defined in Algol 60 (1960), nearly 2 decades before Rabbit (1978).
People did know how to implement things back then, and TeX is a great example of that. It is just our definitions have changed over the years of what we consider better.
'People' in this case were Don Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX). Both are Turing Award winners.