Problem

I recently hit a parser error after upgrading matplotlib from 3.4.2 to 3.7.2 in our build:

\sum_{i=0}^\infty x_i * \frac{3}{4} \binom{3}{4} \stackrel{3}{4} * \sqrt[3]{x}
 ^
ParseFatalException: Expected token, found '\' (at char 49), (line:1, col:50)

After digging through a few rabbit holes (e.g., reverting from pyparsing 3.1.x to 3.0.9), it turns out that stackrel had been deprecated all the way back in 3.1.0.

Proposed solution

It would be nice if, instead of an error like this, it says something like 'stackrel is not a recognized command". Even better would be to have the stackrel deprecation bring up a warning/error at this point.