Yes, noticed this also for the Ampersand symbol. LaTeX (which I'd not previously been familiar with) must have a specific purpose, which seems great and appears to be made greater by this nifty tool.
LaTeX is a typesetting program (related to TeX which was made by Knuth). Its quite popular in academia (sciences at least) because it handles equations really well.
Its analogous to a markup language in that it is not a WYSIWYG typesetting program.