TeX - ! Extra alignment tab has been changed to \cr

[Joseph Wright]

On 09/07/2019 16:20, Carlos wrote:
>>
>> Or do you believe that LaTeX should behave differently than what plain
>> TeX should do with the analogous construct?
>>
> 
> Jim and Paul:
> 
> I've always thought that LaTeX should behave differently ... pretty much in
> the same lines as Plain does, and if not, Remove the error message from
> LaTeX, and then we'll talk about it .. get rid of that crap because is not
> doing anything but further obscuring the problem
>

If I were re-implementing tables for a 'new LaTeX' today, I'd avoid 
using \halign and read stuff in for more controlled construction. As 
others have said, having more alignment points that columns is surely an 
error at the user level, so one might imagine slightly different 
phrasing, but the core message would be the same.

However, that would be a huge change to current LaTeX and likely to 
break a massive amount of stuff. That leaves us with \halign and how it 
treats tabular content. As such, I'm not sure what the outcome here 
could be.

(Also if this is a specific feature request for the LaTeX kernel, it 
would be best logged at https://github.com/latex3/latex2e/issues so the 
entire LaTeX team see it.)

Joseph