[texhax] \binom

[Yannis Haralambous]

Part of my job is to process papers for a well-known Mathematical  
Society, and I'm talking of several thousand pages per year.

In this context, personalized macros are a FELONY, a HEADACHE, a  
CURSE...

1) First of all, often they are bad, one has to read and correct them  
(for example, people will use \rm instead of \mathrm, \matrix instead  
of the matrix environment, eqnarray instead of align, etc. not to  
mention people who want to manually insert spaces about everywhere)

2) secondly, their names will often conflict with other commands I  
need (and we don't have namespaces yet in LaTeX), and the effects will  
sometimes be very subtle (this is also a bit mea culpa since I will  
rather use \def than \newcommand)

3) thirdly, they will always appear in places they shouldn't:  
abstracts, bibliographical references, section names, and the like.  
These pieces of information are needed when compiling data outside the  
scope of individual articles, and macro definitions do not accompany  
them...

So please do not encourage people to use their own macros. I would  
rather appreciate institutions (LUGs, Mathematical societies,  
Faculties) to prepare standard styles with alternative names for  
macros, it will always be better than empirical impulsive "100%  
personal" macros...

Le 2 mars 09 à 10:02, Lars Madsen a écrit :

> this is one of the reasons why I recommend our users to add their own
> macro names for various symbols, e.g. \isomorph for \cong, if \cong is
> used to denote isomorphisms in their field. That way the code  
> becomes a
> lot more readable.

--
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| Yannis Haralambous, Ph.D.      yannis.haralambous at telecom- 
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                             ...pour distinguer l'extérieur d'un  
aquarium,
                                            mieux vaut n'être pas  
poisson

                            ...the ball I threw while playing in the  
park
                                           has not yet reached the  
ground

               Es gab eine Zeit, wo ich nur ungern über Schubert  
sprechen,
            nur Nächtens den Bäumen und Sternen von ihm vorerzählen  
mögen.

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