Message-Id: <199401261655.AA10363@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Wed, 26 Jan 1994 16:35:21 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Changing default preloads
Status: R

%>From:          David Carlisle <carlisle@computer-science.manchester.ac.uk>
%>No one objects (much) to writing \documentstyle or \documentclass at
%>the front of every document, so why do you object to a couple of other
%>declarations setting up encodings/languages/papersize etc ?
%>
%>David
%>

Most likely everyone will object to using anything *other* than
\documentstyle, and it seems to me that there are going to be an endlessly
growing list of parameter declarations (call them classes if you like) that
everyone will need to use at their site. This is getting like Ada and Modula-
2 programming, where you need to declare packages and identifiers from
packages all over the place to make things work.

Is there no mechansism to allow options to be pre-loaded at iniTeX stage, and
then to get these options to announce themselves to you whenever you LaTeX
something? Most users wouldn't need to worry about these details then. Their
paper would be A4, language English, date day/month/year, time 12hr clock,
font encoding OT1, currency symbol pounds, etc.

I am now in favour of a more open approach to LaTeX. Make everything general
enough to do almost anything, ban @ in control words, and let anyone redefine
any ``internal'' control word he likes if it makes things work.

Mike (campaign-for-open-software) Piff

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%