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pretty sure most latex papers and chapters are formatted with tex82, though translated from pascal to c

Most people use pdfLaTeX or XeTeX, which may have some basis in the original Tex82 but have since moved on, at least in code.

aren't pdftex and xetex just patched versions of tex82

Maybe, but I've moved on to tectonic. Which surely isn't in the same language.

Last I checked (though it's been a while), I think tectonic basically wrapped the xetex code.

> pdfTEX is based on the original TEX sources and Web2c

So it at least ties back to original code. XeTeX appears to be similar but with even more extensions, but other of the "TeX" tools are complete rewrites.

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