Message-Id: <199402091625.AA24050@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <9402091532.AA03007@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> (message from Mike Piff on
              Wed, 9 Feb 1994 14:54:22 LCL)
Date:         Wed, 9 Feb 1994 16:23:33 GMT
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@cs.man.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: A philosophical question about packages and options
Status: R

> ... \documentclass[option=value]{article} ....

key = value syntax is generally quite nice for optional arguments.
However, I can only repeat the guiding principles of the upgrade to
2e, as stated in the original announcement:

 * Unmodified version 2.09 document files can be processed with
   LaTeX2e.

 * All new features of LaTeX2e conform to the conventions of version
   2.09, making it as easy as possible for current users to learn to
   use them.

key=value is definitely not a standard convention of 2.09.

That is not to say it is not good thing, and in fact one of the
packages that I am currently wrapping up with latex2e documentation is
a generic parser for parsing comma separated lists of this form.
But this is *not* to be considered as core LaTeX, but rather a
`contributed' package by someone who happens to be on the core team.

As packages can not `legally' change the syntax of \documentclass, as
they are read too late, the one place that such a parser could not add
option=value syntax is in the example given above, oh well that's
life.

2e has to build on the conventions of 2.09, that is a big constraint.
As discussions on this list have shown, even small changes to
apparently innocuous functions can have a big impact on
`compatibility'. In recent weeks the discussions here seem to
oscillate between
`why did you change that, it is no longer compatible'
and
`why havent you improved this feature by changing command xxx'

Of course there is never a good answer to these kind of questions,
some of the decisions have to be arbitrary. While this testing phase
is going on some changes can be made (eg putting \footheight back) and
some changes are just bug fixes (\mediumseries), but for some commands
the interface has to be fixed, as otherwise testing will never finish,
and it will keep changing for ever.

David