* in tabular environment

[David Carlisle]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 at 19:25, William F Hammond <hmwlfsr at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi David,
>
> You write in reply to Fred Harthoorn:
>
> > you have a typo in your example so it will not run at all but I assume
> > that the real issue is that
> >
> > \\
> > *
>
> AIUI "*" is different from "[" in that \\* is a command name
> -- isn't it? -- just as \vspace* is a command name.
>

Not really (apart from a difference in wording in the LaTeX Book.)
there is just one command as far as TeX is concerned, \\
it will look ahead at the next character and test if it is a space, a
* or a [ or anything else and chose an action depending on those four
cases.

Similarly there is no command with name `vspace*`  (try
`\expandafter\csname vspace*\endcsname`)  `\vspace` looks ahead for a
`*`.

David