[tex4ht] Bizarre bug - \def\sp{...}

[Hans Georg Schaathun]

On Tue, Nov 01, 2016 at 08:53:22AM -0700, William F Hammond wrote:
> Unfortunately, latex.ltx (in the latex base) contains:  \let\sp=^

Ah.  I did not know.  Thanks.
Sorry for the off-topic quation:  Does anyone know why?
What is it used for?

> In principle, with LaTeX \newcommand should be used instead of \def and
> that should trap the prior usage.

Yeah, I know.  I am just too lazy to type the extra seven letters :-)
And most of the time, I want to override the obscure default which is
not used anyway.  Besides, \renewcommand/\newcommand can be rather
annoying when you have to switch when certain packages are added or
removed.

>                                         But, alas, \renewcommand does not
> get beyond this issue with tex4ht, which I think must be a bug.

It has been previously been claimed on this list that the objective of 
tex4ht is to produce the same visual output in HTML as is ordinarily 
produced in PDF/DVI.  If that's the objective, then this is a bug,
but clearly it is ambitious.

-- 
:-- Hans Georg