[texhax] large forward slash

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 9 February 2009 Karl Berry wrote:

 > What confused me was that \middle does not appear in LaTeX, nor in
 > plain TeX, nor in the TeXbook, nor in tex.web, nor in etex.src.  I
 > finally realized it is a new e-TeX primitive.  Cool.

Hi Karl,
\middle is not new.  It exists in e-TeX as far as I can remember.  The
file "etex_man.pdf" I mentioned in a previous thread is from March 1998.

The reason that \middle is not mentioned in any manual except the
e-TeX manual itself is that most people are not aware that all engines
are using e-TeX now.  As far as I remember, it was David Kastrup who
asked for integrating e-TeX into LaTeX.  He had been interested in the
advanced debugging functions provided by e-TeX in the first place.
Everything happened in the background, hence it's no wonder that most
people are not aware of the "new" features.

So let me provide the link again, for everybody who is interested:

  http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/e-tex/v2/doc/etex_man.pdf

Regards,
  Reinhard

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