〈 Berger | Dillon 〉

It's sort of amazing that Knuth - the great wizard of computer science - made TeX rely on a new kind of parentheses where a left parenthesis looks just like a right parenthesis: $ $ More amazingly, it also relies on a *different* kind that looks like this: $$ $$

More modern versions of LaTeX correct this deficiency, using \( \) instead of $ $ and \[ \] for $$ $$. But enough facilities - like Wordpress blogs - still use the dollar signs that I find myself needing to translate the dollar signs into other parentheses.

And then the nightmare hits home: using a simple global search-and-replace facility to translate $ $ and $$ $$ into \( \) and \[ \] is not easy! It's especially tough if there are typos, like $$ $. AARGH!!!