conditionalse-texobsolete
In the LaTeX companion, the authors recommend to use the package ifthen for complex conditional.
But in his answer to LaTeX conditional expression Will Robertson doesn't mention it, and in the comments, Philipp says that the package is obsolete.
The question is in which way ifthen is obsolete and what are the risk to use it in a document.
Actually subfig isn't maintained anymore. I would use packages like »subcaption« (shipped with caption) or floatrow. A good list of obsolete packages and other outdated stuff can be found in l2tabu.
Following up on the discussion about how to get this to work in practice, here's a modification to Josef's solution which allows one to use anaphoric pronouns linked to the current state. Pronominal anaphora is quite complicated, so even this solution would only work for a limited set of cases, but it would still be a bit of an improvement.
Update: I've implemented this solution as the he-she package.
The problem arises in sentences like the following:
(As Norman notes, it's perfectly colloquiual English to use 'they' for these sorts of pronouns, but since that's not up for debate here, we'll soldier on :-) )
In sentence (1) we need the pronoun in the main clause to match in gender with the pronoun in the 'if'-clause. If we use the \heshe macro we won't know what the gender is, however, since it will change depending on how many times it has previously been used.
So we really need two macros: one for the switch, and one for anaphoric reference to the current gender state. I've implemented this simply by creating one extra macro within Josef's solution (of course the same idea works for Martin's as well.)
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xspace}
\newif\ifhe\hetrue
\newcommand*\heshe%
{%
\ifhe%
he%
\global\hefalse%
\else%
she%
\global\hetrue%
\fi%
\xspace
}%
\newcommand*\he%
{\ifhe%
she
\else%
he%
\fi
\xspace
}
\begin{document}
If someone thinks \heshe is sick \he should go to a doctor immediately.
When \he goes to the the doctor, \heshe can figure out the problem.
\end{document}
This is a more linguistically useful version than restricting the scope of the change to a single sentence, since in the second sentence of the source example, there are two instances of a pronoun: the first is anaphoric to the previous sentence (and so should match in gender, but the second can be assigned a new gender.)
Best Answer
The main reason why people may consider
ifthenobsolete (last version is of 2001/05/26 with about one page of user manual plus four pages of code documentation) is that it is superseded by e.g.etoolbox, which uses the advanced possibilities ofeTeX. Using these allows faster processing. You still can useifthenfor your existing and new documents if you like and I don't think there is a risk in doing so. However for new code, especially new packages which use a lot of boolean expression using the more modern alternatives is recommended.