[texhax] Obsolete \centerline command used in amsbook class (Uwe L?ck)

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2012-09-23 at 13:36:13 -0400, Michael Barr wrote:

 > Well, I admit that I had confused amstex with amslatex.  I was
 > talking of course of the latter.

You also confuse plain TeX with LaTeX.

 > I certainly agree that redefining \newcommand is shoddy and I would
 > never do that.  But undefining a tex (not plaintex, but actual tex)
 > primitive such as \over is inexcusable.

It should be undefined, of course.  LaTeX provides \frac.  AFAIK
LaTeX3 will probably remove everything it doesn't support.  I don't
understand why people expect that LaTeX works as described in the
TeXbook.  LaTeX is something completely different.  Why is it so hard
to grok that?

 > As for the use of \def, well if there were a procedure that had all
 > the funcionality of \def and just gave a warning instead of
 > stopping on error when you had redefined something, I would gladly
 > use it.  

Does \def give you such a warning?  Why don't you use \renewcommand in
order to redefine something?  Or add \nonstopmode to the top of your
file if you don't want it to stop on errors.

 > I cannot imagine any other reason for deprecating \def
 > than that you might inadvertently redefine something that you
 > didn't realize.

Yes.  \def is only preserved because LaTeX2e doesn't provide a
powerful argument parser.  But LaTeX3 does.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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