17:48:17jcowanSQL was deliberately designed to be the intersection of the intentions of the implementors, which is why older versions have an incredible number of stoopid restrictions.
17:49:05jcowan(By the same token, early Fortran only allowed three kinds of array indices: a plain variable, a variable plus a constant, or a variable minus a constant, so that the action could often be compiled as a single machine instruction.)
17:51:04jcowanAs for TeX, it is what it is. And yes, the dialect of Pascal Knuth used is translated to C using a special-purpose translator. Nowadays it could probably be compiled by Free Pascal, though.