I ran across a small curiosity when working today; specifically that LaTeX defines \coth
by default, but not \sech
or \csch
. I’d like to know why. I think of the three functions are being very similar, so I’m curious as to why one is defined by default, but the others aren’t.
I know that a lot of thought went into the original design of LaTeX, and that suggesting changes (however minor) to the core functionality is a bad idea. So I’m not trying to cast a value judgement on this, I just want to know why it’s done that way.
However, I can imagine that the designers of LaTeX probably aren't interested in explaining (relatively minor) design decisions like this, or that there might not be a single right answer to the question.
Is this an appropriate question to ask on TeX.se? More generally, are questions asking for explanations of why LaTeX behaves as it does appropriate, or should they be reserved to personal curiosities?
;)
Or that allowing the questions (and answers) to be too technical could be discouraging to the more casual users? We do have quite a lot of heavily-technical questions and answers already, though.\X
not defined" and "Why does command\Y
do Z") should be avoided. Then you need to establish what a “major” feature means. Does that sound reasonable?\relax
serve in the definition of\@ensuredmath
?) is undesirable. I don't doubt the merits of such questions, but a large number of them would be detrimental to the site as they would drown "casual" users in "technical" noise.