Message-Id: <199402101604.AA24917@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <9402101548.AA22393@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> (message from Mike Piff on
              Thu, 10 Feb 1994 15:21:20 LCL)
Date:         Thu, 10 Feb 1994 16:01:26 GMT
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@cs.man.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: On compatibility in LaTeX2e [was: Re: keyed options lis
Status: R

Mike, I seem to remember in some earlier messages you commenting on
lack of compatibility in certain areas, then in your last message you
say:

> What I had expected was that you would keep the interface constant,
> but include your nice verbatim, array, theorem, etc, extensions as
> standard.

The Mainz packages are incompatible with original LaTeX. If we had
just put them in the core then old documents would break. Producing
errors where before there was no error (verbatim) producing different
spacing (array).

The ONLY point to the new \documentclass command is that it leaves
\documentstyle to run old documents. We have spent hours trying to
ensure that as far as possible a document starting with \documentstyle
works as before.

So you are quite free to use \documentstyle, but be aware that as far
as possible we will try to ensure that those documents will also work
at a site that is still running 2.09. So most of the new features are
disabled.

David