Message-Id: <199402111319.AA24115@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Fri, 11 Feb 1994 12:09:09 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: Packasses
Status: R

From:          David Carlisle <carlisle@computer-science.manchester.ac.uk>

%>
%>Mike,
%>
%>I had sworn not to respond to any more of these messages, as you dont
%>appear to read any of the replies, but one last go.
%>

On the contrary, I have read every one.

%>> [verbatim] I am pretty sure that few people would have anyway
%>
%>Ha. How many times have we said `few people would have done that'.
%>Take an example you ought to know well: A certain register that was
%>never used by LaTeX, but which was allocated, presumably left over from
%>an early trial version. `few people would have used that'
%>It was only a few days before several people reported the missing
%>register. (\footheight)
%>

The difference between leaving something out and greatly enhancing something.

%>> Were the spacing problems [in array] insurmountable?
%>It is not a problem. It is a deliberate and documented difference in
%>the way it treats vertical rules. All tables with vertical rules end
%>up being wider, which can affect the spacing of the rest of document,
%>it won't in 99% of the cases, but that is not the point.
%>

This is a falacy I have seen often in the TeX world. x produced certain
spacing, y produces different spacing, so y is bad and must not replace x.
You yourself, I think, have said that the old LaTeX isn't going to disappear
so someone could always go back and oldlatex something rather than latex it.
By the same reasoning, you would have to ban the use of \selectfont etc in
compatibility mode, as in old LaTeX it would give an error message, but in
new it might change the appearance of the document. (For the better, I might
add.)

%>> The implication is that \documentclass will take over from
%>> \documentstyle, and that new styles will have to conform to the
%>> [\documentclass] format.  With hard-wired limited options?
%>
%>clopages do not have hard wired limited options. They just have to
%>declare what options they can handle.
%>

Well, if that isn't a subtle distinction I don't know what is!  I think you
only need look at what would have been the consequences if a4 had been
missed from the declared options to see what a design decision you made.

%>The standard classes are only designed to deal with a range of page
%>sizes, but if you want write a class that will handle any string as a
%>valid option,

Far better if the standard ones did this. You could even have included a
warning. If standard LaTeX is not capable of handling any page area with any
size font, with or without double column, landscape, or whatever, then I
don't think there is any hope for it.

Mike

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