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.

>> \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
}

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{...}.
-- 
Joseph Wright