Message-Id: <9311031631.AB24543@sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
In-Reply-To:  <9311031444.AA14688@hp5.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>
              from"Michael Downes" at Nov 3, 93 03:41:04 pm
Date:         Wed, 3 Nov 93 16:26:56 CET
From: Joachim Schrod <schrod@ITI.INFORMATIK.TH-DARMSTADT.DE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: $({\it colon},
Status: R


You wrote:
>
> > We have hundreds of long-living documents that use constructs like
> >
> >     $({\it colon}, {\it space})$
> >
> > all over the place. If they won't work with a new system, I won't
> > switch. And I will recommend the same action to _everybody_ in a
> > similar situation.
>
> I'm curious about one part you didn't mention: Why isn't there
> higher-level markup in those hundreds of documents like
>
>   \syntax{\character{colon}, \character{space}}

I would hope it were so -- but I'm guilty as well. Old habits die hard
-- and this was The One True Way, i.e., the plain way we learned
before LaTeX existed. (I think, even basic.tex from TeX78 had it
already, when i remember correctly.) Oh, I'm guilty that I still use
plain TeX and self-made macro packages a lot...

Besides, it's shorter... :-/ The example above came from the
documentation of a LaTeX style, where I explained that such a token
list was used as an argument delimiter. The higher-level markup is
not so important in this circumstance, I want to explain a fact,
that's all. It's not an important element in my document, it's used
only once. And I don't want to go over MBs [literally] of *WEB code
and change them. (Well, in the case listed above I could choose not
to explain it and think that anybody who wants to understand my style
files shall learn TeX first -- but that would not be fair, either.
:-) You see, it got a second nature not to type $(colon, space)$ --
like inserting ties, for example.

In addition, the documents were partly written for a plain-based
macro package and converted to LaTeX later. (The higher-level markup
was very similar and the conversion straight forward.) Of course,
math material was not touched.

> That would not eliminate the problem of incompatibility if \it can no
> longer work in math, but it would concentrate the points of change to
> a much smaller locus, which is useful in many ways beyond just dealing
> with LaTeX upgrade changes.

I do not expect to change there so often...

> Also, if your documents started with a (self-documenting) command such as
>
>   \TeXformat{LaTeX}{2.09}{<date>}
>
> it would be easier to preserve compatibility.  But the \TeXformat
> command would have to be recognized by the format file, of course.

Yes, that's ok -- let's introduce this with LaTeX2e. As I wrote, I can
live with the fact that the `plain way' does not work anymore in a
LaTeX2e or LaTeX3 document. But older LaTeX 2.09 documents should
still be valid input and should produce results which are not too far
away from the previous ones.

--
Joachim

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Joachim Schrod			Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany