Bob complains that starred commands in LaTeX can have a better user-experience. This actually sent me back in time to younger edoput trying to understand why some scheme functions are suffixed with ‘*’, e.g. append*.

Two instances don’t make a pattern but I’m wondering if there’s a third programming language where * is also used in identifiers with the same intent, “like this other thing, but a little bit different”. Then the next question would be did LaTeX steal this from scheme or vice-versa? Also is this a LaTeXism or is this already in TeX?