X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil]
	["506" "Thu" "19" "December" "1996" "23:09:31" "GMT" "David Carlisle" "carlisle@ma.man.ac.uk" nil "12" "Re: Footnotes" "^Date:" nil nil "12" nil nil nil nil]
	nil)
Received: from listserv.gmd.de (listserv.gmd.de [192.88.97.1])
          by mail.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP
	  id AAA28331; Fri, 20 Dec 1996 00:09:41 +0100 (MET)
Received: from listserv.gmd.de by listserv.gmd.de (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <11.8F4A7D1E@listserv.gmd.de>; Fri, 20 Dec 1996 0:09:41 +0100
Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
          (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 7549 for
          LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 20 Dec 1996 00:09:35 +0100
Received: from vummath.ma.man.ac.uk (vummath.ma.man.ac.uk [130.88.16.53]) by
          relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.7.6/8.7.4) with SMTP id AAA11761 for
          <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>; Fri, 20 Dec 1996 00:09:33
          +0100 (MET)
Received: by vummath.ma.man.ac.uk (SMI-8.6/SMI-4.1:AL2) id XAA18490; Thu, 19
          Dec 1996 23:09:31 GMT
Message-ID:  <199612192309.XAA18490@vummath.ma.man.ac.uk>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
In-Reply-To:  <Pine.SUN.3.91.961219213643.6399A-100000@dana> (message from
              Padraig de Brun on Thu, 19 Dec 1996 21:37:29 +0000)
Date:         Thu, 19 Dec 1996 23:09:31 GMT
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@MA.MAN.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: Footnotes
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 1780

> Ideally, the last.

Ha! I might have known.
The reason this is tricky is that TeX is designed to be a macro
expansion language, with control statements embedded in the data.
This makes `going back' difficult.

In the case at issue, you typically won't know what kind of paragraphs
you need to set until after you have seen several, which means that
you need to have stored them as tokens, or possibly better in an
external temporary file. Nothing's impossible, something to think
about over Christmas...