[SoftTalker]

Even LaTeX just brute-forces dependencies such as building a table of contents, index, and footnote references by running it a few times until everything stabilizes.

[bombcar]

It is possible (though very rare) to get a situation in LaTeX where it keeps oscillating between two possible “solutions” - usually forcing a hbox width will stabilize it.

Or do what everyone does and reword something ;)

[gregates]

VisiCalc didn't do this, though. It just recalculated once, and if there were errors you had to notice them and manually trigger another recalc.

[fsckboy]

but wasn't it documented to do it in some sort of "down and to the right" order, and if you wrote your formulas "up and to the left" everything would be hunky dory?

tables generally have row and column sums, subtotals, and averages down and to the right.