In fact, the syntax of LaTeX (not TeX)—the idea of environments etc—is heavily based on Scribe: Leslie Lamport, who was a Scribe user, basically reimplemented p

In fact, the syntax of LaTeX (not TeX)—the idea of environments etc—is heavily based on Scribe: Leslie Lamport, who was a Scribe user, basically reimplemented parts of Scribe in TeX macros; the result was LaTeX. You can see the resemblance between Scribe's syntax: @Heading(The Beginning) @Begin(Quotation) Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start @End(Quotation) and LaTeX's. Lamport mentions Scribe a few times in this interview: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb22-1-2/tb70lamp.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb22-1-2/tb70lamp.pdf > I don’t think TeX and LaTeX would have become popular had they not been free. Indeed, I think most users would have been happier with Scribe. Had Scribe been free and had it continued to be supported, I suspect it would have won out over TeX. On the other hand, I think it would have been supplanted more quickly by Word than TeX has been. (I'm not sure he's right; I think TeX/LaTeX benefited from both Knuth's concern for typographical excellence and Lamport's concern for authors' convenience, and the "book-quality printing" of TeX would have always had a place, but hard to say what would have happened.) [Edit: Changed "superficial syntax"; I just meant syntax as opposed to implementation details.]