[texhax] Problem with tabular environment

[Michael Barr]

The following file,

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{|b{1cm}|b{1cm}|b{1cm}|}\hline
  1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1&2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2&3 3 3 3\\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

copied from the bottom of p. 106 in the first
edition of The LaTex Companion, results in the error message:

! LaTeX Error: Illegal character in array arg.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
  ...

l.4 \begin{tabular}{|b{1cm}|b{1cm}|b{1cm}|}
                                            \hline
? x

Here is the header of the log file:

This is e-TeXk, Version 3.141592-2.1 (Web2c 7.5.2) (format=latex 2004.4.9) 
12 MAR 2007 10:27
entering extended mode
  %&-line parsing enabled.
  (c:/TeXLive8/texmf/web2c/cp8bit.tcx)
**t
(./t.tex
LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
Babel <v3.7j> and hyphenation patterns for english, dumylang, 
nohyphenation, ba
sque, czech, slovak, german, ngerman, spanish, catalan, french, ukenglish, 
ital
ian, dutch, polish, portuguese, loaded.
(c:/TeXLive8/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2001/04/21 v1.4e Standard LaTeX document class
(c:/TeXLive8/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo
File: size10.clo 2001/04/21 v1.4e Standard LaTeX file (size option)
)

etc.

Any idea what is going on?  Incidentally, it compiles properly when the
b{1cm} are replaced by p{1cm}, but that is not the output I want.


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