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From: nraoaoc@nmt.edu (Daniel Briggs)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: \@ in TeX ?
Message-ID: <1990Aug11.062334.27535@nmt.edu>
Date: 11 Aug 90 06:23:34 GMT
Reply-To: dbriggs@nrao.edu (Daniel Briggs)
Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro NM
Lines: 21

This may be a silly question, but is one that I have wondered about.  The
answer is not immediately obvious to me.  (And yes, I think that I've
RTFM.)  Simply put, LaTeX provides a simple control sequence to tell the
program that a given period after a capital letter actually ends a sentence,
and is not an abbreviation.  Lamport's example of this is

 The Romans wrote I + I = II\@.  Really!

I looked up the definition of \@ in LaTeX, and it turns out to be some
fairly obscure arcana.  It sets some interword penalty or other to 1000.
Not the sort of stuff that you would expect your average TeXnician to
employ.  My question is, how does a normal person deal with this problem
in plain TeX?  The problem of capital letters ending sentences does occur
often enough to be a problem for many folks.  Short of rewriting the
sentence, is there an easy equivalent to \@ ?  As usual, post or email
is fine with me.  Thanks!

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