Joseph Wright wrote:
> Arno Trautmann wrote:
>>> \latexstart
>> What is this good for?…
> 
> Just an idea, based on \starttext from ConTeXt.  I quite liked the idea
> that the entire document was within a "latex environment".  Totally
> unnecessary, of course.

Isn’t the \starttext like \begin{document}?

>>> \itemizestart
>>>   \item An item
>>>   \item Another one
>>> \itemizeend
>> Now that I read code not written by me, I notize a disadvantage: It’s
>> much harder to distinguish macros from environments. Maybe
>>
>> \itemize_start
>>   \item
>>   \item
>> \itemize_end
>>
>> might be better?
> 
> This takes us back to the category code of non-letter characters: I
> doubt that having _ as a document-level "letter" is a good plan.  Of
> course, you could do something like
> 
> \def\itemize_#1{% _ *not* a letter
>   % Do tests on #1
> }

That’s not really beautiful…
Maybe \itemizeStart?

> I'm not sure that this is much of an improvement on sticking with the
> current scheme, however. Perhaps this shows us the wisdom of using
> \begin{...} and \end{...}.

Yes… I think, that was a very clever person who invented this…

cheers
Arno