[tex-k] \showthe followed with undefined control sequence misbehaves

[tttex at mailbox.org]

I could imagine that the reason why \let is in `' marks is that there can be other types of commands displayed within this error message which have internal whitespace. If you type for example

  \showthe {
  
you get

  ! You can't use `begin-group character {' after \the.

The `' marks help in this case to set the command descriptor apart from the rest of the sentence.

Best,
Tyge