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On 1/4/2016 5:12 PM, Alan BRASLAU wrote:
Hi,
I do not know the history of \lparen and \lparent (not in the TeX Book nor in the LaTeX Companion), but I find these abbreviations to be unfortunate.
As Hans knows, we eliminated them from the bibliography subsystem, preferring "parenthesis" to "paren" or "parent".
These cryptic (and confusing) abbreviations should be avoided when possible. But, of course, we should keep "sacred" abbreviations that are standard in TeX (but not necessarily all offshoots).
Alan
PS, how is this better than the TeX \left( ? (it shouldn't matter that it is one rather than two tokens.)
that depends ... \left\foo : one token \left( : one token \left(( : interpreting ( ( becomes messy so better is just \lparent foo \rparent (tex is also a bit picky when it comes to unmatched \left and \right so we need to catch that too) some of the abbreviations are coming from all those messy incomplete cq. merged cq ... systems that deal with math (mathml entities, traditional who-knows-where-they-come-from names, too tolerant asciimath hybrids, etc.) so that's why we have more such funny names than needed: it's the way we support automated typesetting ... you really don't want to know what nightmarisch stuff we need to support so keep in mind that not all defined \commands in the core are intended for users, so \lparen is there but it can be for any reason (current or past), e.g. some crap we ran into that was supported someplace else and that we have to support maybe just because some sloppy programmer decided to support a sloppy user not realizing possible conflicts or bad side effects elsewhere) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------