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  • Unless you plan to do something very unusual, understanding the source of TeX is not necessary to use TeX. Certainly I would not claim to know much Pascal, but I'm quite good at programming TeX. Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 12:29
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    One piece of advise from an old fart: Concentrate on what is (more or less) immediately useful. That way you have more motivation, and the risk of getting sidetracked is much less. TeX is not a good way to learn how to build packages, it uses a very idiosyncratic language (web), and was written to install on all sort of extremely weird machines/operating systems (most of them long defunct). Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 18:51
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    Like you, I also wanted to study the TeX code. After all, it was written by an eminent computer scientist, and, for a large piece of software, it is remarkably free of bugs. It looked like something significant could be learned. But, I gave up after a while. Mostly because the code is full of clever tricks to pack data into memory locations to save space. This made sense 30 years ago, but not so much today, and it makes the code very difficult to read (for me, anyway). There is a system called JavaTex, by Tim Murphy, which might be a bit easier to read, maybe. But I ran out of time. Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 10:31
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    Also, I agree with vonbrand -- Tex includes a lot of exotic code that was required to make things portable 30 years ago. Commented Apr 30, 2013 at 10:34
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    ctan.math.illinois.edu/info/knuth-pdf/tex/tex.pdf Commented May 31, 2021 at 18:58