Just FYI: I don't think the braces are required here (unless you want to prevent kerning).

The idea is to have a general rule that all \Cpp macros are followed by {}. Whether that's necessary in a particular situation should not matter.

The only downsides are the adverse impact on readability of the source and (potentially) kerning.

I doubt that kerning is much of a problem here. And giving up a little bit of readability to gain consistency (for those editors who are less familiar with TeX's parsing rules) sounds like a reasonable thing to do.

(We could also add a lint check to warn in suspicious uses of \Cpp without the terminating {}.)

This change does in fact not cause any visual diff.

@godbyk: Yes, sure, that sounds useful!

This is a separate issue, but is there any reason to keep \Fundescx around?

It doesn't seem to be used, except for \Fundesc.

Separate issue: Should use square brackets: \item[Stage #1:] and adjust formatting of items in description environments. (Note that the description environment is also used in preprocessor.tex in a weird way, too.)

Done, thanks!

Separate issue: If you just want \emph to have the same effect as \textit (i.e., the text is always italic regardless of the context), then you could just write \let\emph\textit.

Isn't that the default definition of \emph anyway?

\emph alternates between italics and roman type as its nested, while \textit does not.

For example, \emph{Hello, \emph{world}!} would be typeset as “Hello, world!” In contrast, \textit{Hello, \textit{world}!} would be typeset as “Hello, world!”

Ah yes, of course. Luckily we aren't quite that nestedly empathetic in the standard. :-)

In fact, it's shocking how little we \emphasize in the standard compared to the time we spend talking about it!

Separate issue: Should this definition be moved to macros.tex?