You don't need such a complex example to show that tex2ooo, whatever it is for, is quite broken. (%i5) trace(?tex); (%o5) [tex] (%i7) tex(x*y); 1 Enter ?tex [x y, false, false, mparen, mparen] 2 Enter ?tex [x, false, cdot , mparen, *] (X . " cdot ") has an atomic cdr - `display' -- an error. To debug this try debugmode(true);