TeX - ! Extra alignment tab has been changed to \cr

[Karl Berry]

Hi Carlos,

     Extra alignment tab has been changed to \cr

    When you ask an Anglophone speaking individual what from the above he/she
    can understand from it,, that individual might reply - and rightly so -
    that what the message conveys is that the \cr was applied to the newline,

I disagree. Whatever the input was (I still can't make sense of your
examples, sorry), that error message from TeX says nothing about
newlines. It says that an extra alignment tab has been changed to
\cr. And that is precisely what TeX did.

In plain TeX (also in LaTeX, for that matter), alignment tabs are not
newlines (unless the user him/herself made it so, which would be a
strange thing to do), and there is nothing in The TeXbook to suggest
that might be the case.

I cannot speak about LaTeX, but speaking as the person who's charged
with filtering bug reports to Knuth, I see nothing to send to him here.
--best, karl.