[texhax] Renewcommand not working for \Lambda and \Sigma

[Philip TAYLOR]

KKThird at Yahoo.Com wrote:

> Hello all.
> 
> I would like to redefine the capital Greek letters so that they can be 
> used without worrying about putting $ around them in in-line text. I was 
> able to do this fine for all letters except for \Lambda and \Sigma 
> (uppercase). The following is the code I used in the preamble of my 
> document.
> 
> \renewcommand{\Lambda}{\ensuremath \Lambda\xspace}
> \renewcommand{\Sigma}{\ensuremath\Sigma\xspace}
> 
> What happens is that my LaTeX hits waht appears to be an infinite loop 
> and then runs out of memory and then shuts down. Any thoughts on why 
> \Lambda and \Sigma are the only ones (upper or lower case) that are 
> giving me such trouble?

No, I would expect the problem to occur for all maths characters,
since you are defining a macro (\Lambda, \Sigma) in terms of itself.
What you may need to do is to add one level of redirection --

	\let \LamportsLambda = \Lambda
	\let \LamportsSigma = \Sigma
	\renewcommand \Lambda {\ensuremath \LamportsLambda \xspace}
	\renewcommand \Sigma  {\ensuremath \LamportsSigma  \xspace}

which will remove the infinite recursion (I hope !).  Are you sure
that the other Greek letters that you are trying to (re-)define
actually have /a priori/ definitions ?  The TeXbook suggests that
many don't ...

Philip Taylor