TexWorks destroys tex document when compiling with pdfLaTex

Question

When I input

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
  Hello World!
\end{document}

and compile with pdfLaTex, the output .pdf file is created and looks good. My sourcefile doesn't.

Answer 1

Output overwriting input...

In this case, it is obvious what happens because of using the output extension for the input extension. In olden times, one rather subtle but quite dreadful mistake you could commit was writing

\include{chapter1.tex}

which resulted in LaTeX writing auxiliary data on a file chapter1.tex.aux which the DOS file system abbreviated to chapter1.tex which was then gone.

Later versions of emTeX were smarter about what file names it would overwrite, and when it would refuse. But this trap was present in several DOS-based TeX distributions.

I'm still somewhat surprised by TeXWork's behavior: I'd have expected LaTex.pdf (cough cough) to be compiled into LaTex.pdf.pdf without conflict. Or at least, like emTeX in olden times learnt to do, to refuse overwriting the original file. I almost fear that this behavior could result in resuscitating the above-mentioned age-old \include catastrophe.