The <lalLaTeX> environment works much the same was as the <lalVerbatim> environment. The distinction being that the extracted material should be valid LATEX ready for insertion into a LATEX file.
In the <lalLaTeX> environment, leading ``*'''s on a line will be stripped out by laldoc. This is to accommodate the common practice in c of putting leading ``*'''s on comment lines. The way this is done is laldoc checks to see if the first non blank character on the line is a ``*''. If it is, then it is replaced by blank when the line is written to the output file. The leading blanks are ignored when the file is LATEXed.