Message-Id: <199312210554.AA00565@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
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Date:         Mon, 20 Dec 93 13:34:22 +0100
From: Frank Mittelbach <MITTELBACH@mzdmza.zdv.uni-mainz.de>
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To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: ***COMPLETELY UNFOUNDED***
Status: R


Subj:	***COMPLETELY UNFOUNDED***
>
>      No evidence for the oft repeated thesis that one should not
> mix LaTeX with TeX primitives.

Larry, I can't agree with you here. your mail was good evidence for
this thesis: it was a typical case of using \hbox versus \mbox \vbox
versus \parbox with the result that important initialisations are
missing.

of course it is possible to mix plain and LaTeX; however it requires
good knowldge and it usually is only correct for the direct
application. But, and this is the important part, other people then
use this ``nice solution'' in other places and the system falls over.

Then there follow the complaints that LaTeX is soooo infexible you
can't even use plain commands in it. But in most cases this is rubbish
because a) the problem could have been solved using latex constructs
and b) there is no system in the work that you can't kill that way
(just because GNU emcas is written in C it doesn't follow that you can
stick C source into the emacs lisp reader, does it?)

cheer
Frank