[texhax] texhax Digest, Vol 2009, Issue 379

[Toby Cubitt]

On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 04:55:04PM +0200, Susan Dittmar wrote:
> Quoting Toby Cubitt (tsc25 at cantab.net):
> > Really? I just tried \renewenvironment{paragraph}{foo}{bar} and it
> > happily defines the new paragraph environment (redefining the \paragraph
> > command behind the scenes, with no complaints).
>
> No complaints only because you did not put it through tests. With \re...
> you circumvented exactly the tests the others ran into. But your code will
> break a lot of existing examples -- anything using the standard \paragraph
> syntax. Probably without any helpful error messages -- TeX will just be
> missing \end's. It's much safer to give it a unique name as it differs
> quite a bit from the standard \paragraph.

You're probably right that giving it a new name is safer. I was just
pointing out that the statement:

>>> [...] both \newenvironment\paragraph{...}{...}
>>> and \renewenvironment\paragraph{...}{...} will throw up an error:

was not quite correct. The latter does not throw up an error, so it's
perfectly *possible* to define a "paragraph" environment to supplant the
\paragraph command. Whether it's desirable or not, I leave up to the
original questioner!

Toby
--
Dr T. S. Cubitt
Quantum Information Theory group
Department of Mathematics
University of Bristol
United Kingdom

email: tsc25 at cantab.net
web: www.dr-qubit.org