Last words
Malcolm Clark · 1992
Abstract What will the future of Tex be? Will there be a Tex4 to follow the Tex3 of 1989? It is clear from the statements made by Knuth that he is unwilling to consider this possibility. It may not be impossible, since the change to Tex3 seemed impossible immediately before the Stanford conference at which Knuth announced his intention to make one last major change (the ability for Tex to handle 8-bit characters rather than 7-bit), and a number of less significant (though sometimes extremely useful) changes. Nevertheless, Knuth has said that Tex3 is ‘frozen’, or at least, the only changes which will be made are corrections to the code.