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Date:         Thu, 22 Feb 90 16:57:00 GMT
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.bitnet>
Sender: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.bitnet>
From: "Chris Rowley - Open University UK (R01/Maths)" <CA_ROWLEY@VAX.ACS.OPEN.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: \begin...\end interface
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
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How nice to be able to "reply" to you all at once again!

And thanks to Don for saving me time by spelling out so clearly the
arguments against Rainer's suggestion.

> Not a good idea. If you recall, (well actually I guess you won't,
> but Frank will), Leslie Lamport stated as item one on the new
> LaTeX, and this _is_ important, upward compatibility from version
> 2.09. To be specific, if it's in the copy of the LaTeX manual
> sitting on your shelf, it should work in version 6000000.09 of
> LaTeX, not to mention 2.10 or 3.
Not quite: my memory is that this would hold for 2.10, but that for
2.* documents to "work" under 3.0 it may be necessary to add an extra
style option.


I would paticularly emphasise this bit:
> Also the \begin{tt}...\end{tt} type trick
> also appears in that manual. (The latter is quite useful for
> delimiting large blocks of text in another font, and also more
> popular with the consistancy-minded people who type out
> \begin{math}...\end{math} rather than $...$ or \(...\) simply
> because they like to keep all the structure clear.)
I encourage people to do this as it preserves the "uniform interface"

I can now also admit to the more personal reasons for not wanting any
such (un-needed changes): I have a very large number of extra
environments in the styles I have created, and don't want to have to
change them all! and I often use the corresponding \@foo control
sequence within the definition of \foo.


chris