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	["1415" "Thu" "25" "June" "1998" "18:19:44" "+0200" "Hans Aberg" "haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE" nil "29" "Re: Modules" "^Date:" nil nil "6" nil nil nil nil nil]
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Date:         Thu, 25 Jun 1998 18:19:44 +0200
From: Hans Aberg <haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE>
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Subject:      Re: Modules
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At 14:58 +0100 98/06/25, Philip Taylor (RHBNC) wrote:
>>>   I guess there will be a command called \tex_def or \tex/def or something,
>>> which one can use.
>
>Indeed, that was my very point : David was suggesting that \def could
>be made inaccessible by the format; I argued that all the while TeX lacks
>the equivalent of PostScript's "bind", primitives which are used by
>maos defined in the format source and which must be accessible to
>the user code can never be made totally inaccessible.  You can "hide"
>them but you can't remove them, so why bother even to hide them if an astute
>programmer can work his way around the hiding mechanism?

  I think the idea should be to help indicating objects proper use.

>(the earlier proposal to use commercial-at is just one way of hiding such
> things, neither better nor worse (in this context) than any other mechanism).

  For use with modules, my suggestion is that @ should be used for
indicating that a command is "private" or "protected", that is not for
external use of that module.

  So the command should then be named \tex/def and not \tex/@def, as some
other module is going to use it, like other modules defining \<module
name>/new.

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>