[texhax] Problem with \LaTeX macro

[Michael Barr]

As I thought I had explained, I was dealing with someone else's paper, 
readying it for publication.  As it turned out, that was the only instance 
of \@ in the paper and I just deleted it and things were fine.  But I did 
want an explanation and this is it.  Thanks.

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Robin Fairbairns wrote:

> > The following minimal file
> > 
> > \documentclass{article}
> > \def\@{\char'100}
> > \begin{document}
> > \LaTeX 2e
> > \end{document}
> > 
> > leads to an error message.  If you remove the 2 it doesn't.  Any number 
> > from 1 to 7 will casue the error message, but 8 and 9 (nor any other 
> > character I tested) does.  The message is 
> > 
> > "Bad character code"
> > 
> > and then "e".  This occurs in a paper submitted by an online journal and I 
> > can obviously do whatever he wants in a different, but I am curious what 
> > is going on.
> 
> 1) it's bad news to redefine an internal latex command, such as \@;
>    latex has a tendency to use \@ all over the place, so you're going
>    to get your \char'100 similarly all over the place.  \LaTeX is a
>    command that does that.  it's because of the potential for this
>    sort of error that the \newcommand command was designed.
> 2) there's a latex macro \LaTeXe for latex2e
> 3) you've committed the bug of not terminating the number in your
>    command: \def\atsign{\char'100 } works fine.  knuth has a lot about
>    that bug in the texbook somewhere.
> 
> finally, why do you want a macro to produce an @ sign?  what do you
> have against typing @ when you need an @ sign?
>