X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] ["1989" "Thu" "3" "December" "92" "19:28:52" "CET" "Michael Downes" "MJD@MATH.AMS.ORG" nil "51" "Re: structured comments (was: accents)" "^Date:" nil nil "12"]) Return-Path: Received: from sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (serv01) by dagobert.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.1/SMI-4.0/1.9.92 ) id AA13041; Thu, 3 Dec 92 19:28:43 +0100 Received: from vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (vm.hd-net.uni-heidelberg.de) by sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.0/SMI-4.0-sc/19.6.92) id AA28091; Thu, 3 Dec 92 19:28:40 +0100 Message-Id: <9212031828.AA28091@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de> Received: from DHDURZ1 by vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 0752; Thu, 03 Dec 92 19:29:12 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 3367; Thu, 03 Dec 92 19:29:06 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 3365; Thu, 03 Dec 92 19:29:03 CET Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project In-Reply-To: <01GRVK3LZWZ6EHWU0K@MATH.AMS.ORG> Date: Thu, 3 Dec 92 19:28:52 CET From: Michael Downes Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple Recipients of Subject: Re: structured comments (was: accents) Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 892 David Carlisle wrote: > It *may* be reasonable to switch character sets from within (a > successor to) TeX, rather than from the command line, or having > different sets built into different executables, but such extra > functionality should *not* be a comment, rather it should be a new > primitive > \characterset= Agreed. I favor having every format define some standard basic declarations that could be used before a documentstyle is loaded, for example \TeXformat{latex}{3.1}{1994-3-14} \documentname{myarticle} \encoding{iso8859-1} ... Then if a documentstyle is used with an unsupported format it could give an immediate, precise warning explaining the problem, rather than blowing up with an arcane primitive TeX error at the first unexpected incompatibility. The \encoding declaration would provide a higher-level interface to the \characterset primitive, to translate meaningful names into numbers (as with language declarations). The \documentname declaration could perhaps be just as well defined in the documentstyle, but then it can be used only after the \documentstyle, which seems backwards. The motivation for *not* putting this information into comments is that it would be useful to have it directly accessible for macro programming, as the format file checking example shows; one can also imagine writing something like \ifcase\characterset \usefonts{xxx} \or \usefonts{yyy} \or ... The \documentname declaration is used in-house at the American Mathematical Society as a way of doublechecking that the external file name matches the intended document name; externally we can make duplicate file names generate an error, and do other file management, but there are some kinds of problems that cannot be caught unless TeX is used to do the catching. Without a \documentname declaration there is no way for TeX to know if \jobname is not what it is supposed to be. Michael Downes mjd@math.ams.org (Internet)