> One variant would be to start offering LaTeX-variants of \halign and > \valign which (i) has less corny syntax, (ii) takes care to prevent errors > of the kind discussed, and (iii) might offer a few extra features (e.g. > calc-like syntax for \tabskip glue specifications or something; I don't > know if that might be useful). What I'm thinking of is that you could write > something like Lars, while a suggestion like this would perhaps be an improvement for package/class writers it wouldn't solve the update problem i was talking about; and if you rely on code only working correctly if no straight \halign is arround accepting arbitrary text, then this is a real problem. find /cdrom/texmf/tex/latex -type f -exec grep -l halign {} \; alone gives you 67 packages/classes that have \halign in their code (well to be exact have "halign" somewhere in their text :-), many many more would be out there and all of them would suddenly bomb if not updated frank