Message-Id: <199402011256.AA13773@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Tue, 1 Feb 1994 11:53:52 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@SHEFFIELD.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: form and content
Status: R

%>From:          michal@gortel.phys.ualberta.ca (Michal Jaegermann)

%>> %>The section and item environments *exist* right *now*, in classic,
%>> %>pure LaTeX 2.09, and also in the new LaTeX2e.
%>>
%>> Now that *was* a revelation, although if I had thought about the macros
%>> enough I would have seen it. Now why did Lamport not mention this in his
%>> manual?
%>
%>Lamport DID mention that explicitely and not only in an example,
%>although it is not exactly in blazing letters on the very front.
%>Check the last sentence of a subsection "Commands and Environments" in
%>2.5 on p. 34.
%>

You are right, and in a sense wrong! For Lamport was careful to distinguish
this object called a "declaration" on p17+152 as a command that produces no
text but just changes the way that other commands might work. Thus most
commands, such as \section or \item would not qualify as declarations; one
would not normally scope them.

Come to think of it, who would have thought of saying
\begin{documentstyle}
or
\begin{newcommand}
for instance? and where do you put the \end{}?

I guess the problem is that if you approach LaTeX from the logical point of
view, with no knowledge of TeX, then what fixes in the mind is the details
like \em is a declaration, declarations can be done as environments,
therefore \em can be done as \begin{em}..\end{em}.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
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