```Dear Latex-L members!

In the following I would like to make some remarks and suggestions
on the tabular and array environments. I hope somebody else is interested in
these problems, two. I also don't know, if these problems have been
discussed before (maybe someone knows).

1) The array/tabular environments are intended for tabulars with
constant baseline-distance. The baselineskip-mechanism of TeX is
turned off (\lineskip=0pt). LaTeX works with struts instead. The
problem here is that there is no minimal vertical space between the lines.
But in some situations it would be desirable, if vertical space
would be inserted automatically. Especially when one writes large
formulas.
The equation environments do insert vertical space. But they can only
deal with a very restricted form of the horizontal alignment.
It would be nice if there was a generalized equation environment,
where one can give arbitrary preambles for the horizontal alignment.

2) Sometimes it happens that one wants some mathematical material
to be ``displayed'', but this material has to be aligned
horizontally. If one wants \displaystyle, one has to switch to
\displaystyle in every column by hand (or define a new columntype).
But there are no standard columntypes for \displaystyle material.
The easiest way would be, if there was an argument-switch in the
alignment-environment where one could turn on ``\displaymode in
every column''.

Does anyone agree?

Volker
```