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Date:         Tue, 4 Mar 1997 00:09:19 +0100
From: Hans Aberg <haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: Shortref mechanism
Status: R

Frank Mittelbach <Frank.Mittelbach@UNI-MAINZ.DE> writes:

> >   But, continuing this theme of non-deterministic parsing, have you tried
> > picking up say a whole word in advance, then doing some parsing of it
> > (expanding all macros in it, and replacing it with a word where TeX might
> > regonize it.
> >   More explicitly, one would type say
> >     <foo\a bar>
> > Then the "<" would pick up the whole "foo\a bar>", expanding the \a,
> > finally returning "foobar". Would it be possible to recognize a ligature
> > "ob" by this method? (The example is otherwise entirely hypothetical.)
>
>it would but on the other hand it would not help as you
>
> a) need that > character there is not anything you could choose, eg
>scanning up to the next space or so is no answer as you would run into
>problems inside arguments etc
>
> b) there is this nasty case of \verb which modifies TeXs parsing and
>you would kill that case as well
>
>so again, unless you make everything "letter" and "other" except for
>"\" and the start of shortref strings and essentially build your own
>parser for all of the text (with the problem of handling nested groups
>etc etc) there is no way to make this work

  The discussion concerns a somewhat artifical style of programming, but
one could think of picking up something bigger, say a sentence or a
paragraph in advance. The parser would have some knowledge of when to
abort. Perhaps one could do this by the idea of a "text environment". One
would then have to write (what semantically corresponds to)
    \begin{text}...\end{text}\verb...
and not
    \begin{text}...\verb...\end{text}
if one wnat that particular feature (ligatures, or whatever).
-- Perhaps with an improved syntax.

  I would not experiment with it myself, but for those willing fakires out
there...

  Hans Aberg