Message-Id: <199403151219.AA08601@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <m0pgVvJ-0006RXC@rsuna.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> (message from Laurent
              SIEBENMANN on Tue, 15 Mar 1994 03:49:38 +0000)
Date:         Tue, 15 Mar 1994 11:07:00 GMT
From: Alan Jeffrey <alanje@cogs.sussex.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: nag nag nag
Status: R

>That intolerance was entirely caused by LaTeX's (unnecessary!?)
>fragilities

Well, LaTeX is trying to do a bit more with B. L. User's tokens than
your average TeX macro package.  I usually test macros to make sure
they work in two settings:

 * \let\protect=\string \message{STUFF}
 * \let\protect=\noexpand \edef\temp{STUFF}

If it survives those two, it'll probably survive most LaTeX commands.
If you think these are unnecessary, consider:

 a) how to write a token stream (which may include the contents of
    counters, marks, etc.) to a toc file.

 b) how to upper-case a token stream.

If you can do either of these without introducing fragility (or
all-caps fonts :-), congratulations!

It's not too difficult to define robust macros, with appropriate uses
of \protect in the macro definition.

>Is that too much to ask of 2e?

It's not too much to ask of LaTeX3...

Alan.

Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +44 273 606755 x 3238         alanje@cogs.susx.ac.uk
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, Sussex Univ., Brighton BN1 9QH, UK