beware your soul ..

i have been LaTeXing lately, and perhaps it will become a paper ..

.. after a long, arduous process, of course,
with many edits and rewrites,

but perhaps .. \:

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i might have mentioned this before, but when left unchecked, LaTeX will consume your soul. computer programming of any sort, even excessive typing, will do this.

the problem, i think, occurs when one forgets that the code is not the important thing. for instance, it's easy to obsess over making LaTeX look even prettier than it already is ..

.. or when writing a program in C,
where you may write a function procedure
to handle the exception caused by the previous function,
which you had written to replace the earlier function,
which didn't have an exception,
but didn't handle cases in the object type that you wanted,
because your previous class construct didn't compile,
and you never figured out why,
and at the time you thought it easier to start from new.

one thing leads to another, then another, and at some point you realise that you're obsessing over something that has nothing to do with good mathematics or good programming or good anything.

i've heard that graphics in LaTeX are such quagmires.

so suggests the advice i've been told, when once i studied computer science:

unless you are really good at coding, NEVER improvise in front of the computer screen. always code with a plan in mind, and if the plan changes, sort it out first and then go back to coding.

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then again, meandering can have its benefits. while updating a preliminary bibliography, i remembered a theorem from one reference.

i think i can generalise the result, now.
so the LaTeX ceases, and the mathematics continues.