\title{Malcolm's gleanings}
\author{Malcolm Clark}
\begin{Article}
\section{In consistency}
`A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'. That tireless
defender of \TeX\ Allan Reese made no mention of \TeX\ whatsoever in
his last article published in the \textsl{Times Higher}
(March 17th?) demonstrating his immunity
from the charge of hobgoblin. That's fine this once, but if he wants his
accolades to accrue he must adhere to the one true path.

\section{\textsc{Minse}}
Browsing through the World Wide Web Consortium's maths-related pages, I came
across \textsc{Minse}. Described by its author, Ka-Ping Yee,
as a `simple, extensible
way to express mathematics' it does seem to contain many interesting and useful
ideas. Besides taking a semantic description of an equation and rendering it
into several different forms, it may also render it into audio (with some
acknowledgement to T V Raman). Ping also says that a \textsc{Minse} expression
may be turned into a form which is understood by \TeX. If you want to know
more, point your Web browser at \url{www.lfw.org/math/demo.html}.

\section{Times change}
Our chairman, now the proud possessor of a copy of
`\TeX\ and Metafont, New Directions in Typesetting', pointed out
the following quotation to me:
\begin{quote}
  ``Those of you who wish to define control sequences should know that
  \TeX{} has further rules about them, namely that many different
  spellings of the same control sequence may be possible.  This fact
  allows \TeX{} to handle control sequences quite efficiently; and
  \TeX's usefulness is not seriously affected, because new control
  sequences aren't needed very often.''
\end{quote}
Robin adds,
\begin{quotation}
``It's plain that Knuth hadn't at the time yet discussed life, the
universe and everything with Lamport!

The rules themselves are indeed horrendous, and go out of their way to
put automatic generation of control sequence names pretty much out of
the question.''\end{quotation}
\section{\TUB}
It was good to see \TUB\ recently. I did note that there has been a minor
presentational change to the journal. The spine now merely notes the volume and
number, omitting the month and year.
It does make it that bit more difficult to see how
late it is. Wise move, if ominous, just as it seemed to be getting on time.
Not that I
can really say anything about timeliness, the edition of \BV\ that I edited
took an awfully long time to get through the process. I do think the content
was good. Thanks to those who contributed. On the subject of journals, let me
commend Don Hosek's \textsl{Serif} to you, now on edition 4 (see \BV\ 5.1). It's
early preciousness seems to be evening out, and the proof reading has similarly
improved. Since it is set in \TeX, it is especially fascinating. Just how does
Don manage to do all those things which we never expect \TeX\ to do. It is a
great pity that he did not provide the article for the Santa Barbara
\TUB\ Proceedings (it should have been in 15(3))
from the talk he gave there, where he discussed ways of
bending \TeX\ to his will. Hint?

\end{Article}
