Message-Id: <199402021100.AA13316@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Wed, 2 Feb 1994 10:51:24 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: Subject: AmS-LaTeX with 2e
Status: R

From:          Rainer Schoepf <schoepf@SC.ZIB-BERLIN.DE>
%>
%>Mike Piff writes regarding the renaming of \mediumseries and
%>\normalshape:
%>
%> > Let's have a tradition in LaTeX of re-naming everything every couple of
%> > years. We all like editing our files regularly, don't we?
%>
%>I find this remark extremely besides the point. Let me note that
%>
%>- the original commands were introduced in NFSS2 which is beta
%>  software,

This was a general comment about renaming of commands, not specific to these
two. In fact, I found none of my .sty files that used it, but quite a few
that used \normalshapedefault. Is this now to be changed to \upshapedefault
in the future?

%>- I'm not aware of any files using these two commands, except those
%>  shipped with NFSS2.
%>

I only found one, a file to do smart italic correction.

%>After having spent the last months with getting the LaTeX2e software
%>ready for the world, I can live without remarks like the one quoted
%>above. For quite some time now, I feel more and more sympathy for
%>Leslie Lamport's attitude in answering questions.
%>
%>Speaking for me, and neither for the programming team nor for the
%>LaTeX3 project,
%>

With a compiler language, I can see that a file is wrong by running it
through the compiler. If xxx is undefined, it tells me so, and I never get an
executable.

With a macro language I can have files that appear to be working ok,
effectively at the executable stage, until one day, on someone's file, they
bomb out because \xxx is no longer defined.

If we had all conscientiously edited our files to use \normalshape when nfss2
was released, we would have had timebombs all over the place. But the same
goes for any other commands that change/disappear. There is an enormous
amount of software out there in TeX that is going to be extremely time
consuming to read through and alter if it uses commands that no longer exist.
And perhaps it was bug-free before. We then have the upgrade-with-new-bugs
scenario.

It is only a few months ago that we had that furore about nfxxx vs xxx.

I think we need to know what commands can safely be used in styles, packages
or whatever you want to call them, and in document files, and which ones are
unsafe. I have recently spent many happy hours editing the likes of
\reset@font out of my files. I don't want to have to go through that again in
another few months. (And in a transition, where nfss1, nfss2 and latex2e are
being provided simultaneously, one would possibly need three copies of many
files.)

I appreciate all the work you have done---free---on the LaTeX project, but it
isn't just the developers that get irritated some times, its the consumers
also. Anyway, I apologize publicly for any offence caused to you.

Mike

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%