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Date:         Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:57:24 +0100
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From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Morten_H=F8gholm?=
              <morten.hoegholm@LATEX-PROJECT.ORG>
Subject: Re: Misleading cs names?
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <18269.25346.697845.365250@morse.mittelbach-online.de>
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Status: R

On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:02:10 +0100, Frank Mittelbach wrote:

> Let us step back and reevaluate what the arg forms are supposed to mean:
>
[...]
> It makes no statements about what \foo:nnn does with the arguments it
> receives.

Yes, this is important I think. An n form may well be used by a function  
to construct as csname internally (l3xref is an example).

> Some people have suggested we shouldn't provide the short forms, though  
> I feel
> that they make life much easier once you get the hang of it,

(I can only say that I feel the same way as you.)

> but in any
> case they are only shorts for "manipulate some arguments prior to  
> passing them to a function"

Agreed.

> There is a bit of inconsistency here in that something like T F are arg
> specifiers that give information about the argument purpose rather than  
> about
> a manipulation of the argument and perhaps some of the concepts should be
> reviewed and unified -- but the direction should be less arg specifiers  
> not more

If we have predicate functions \..._p:NN, what if the TF were called  
\..._t:NNn, \..._f:NNn, and \..._t_f:NNnn instead? Besides removing two  
argument specifiers, it would also mean we could do something better about  
monstrosities such as
   \bool_double_if:NNnnnn
which was something I needed somewhere but I knew the name was terrible  
(from l3prg):

%    Execute |#3| iff TT, |#4| iff TF, |#5| iff FT and |#6| iff
%    FF. The name isn't that great but I'll have to think about
%    that. Ideally it should be something with |TF| since only one of
%    the cases is executed but we haven't got any naming scheme for
%    this kind of thing so for now I'll just stick to simple |nnnn|.

With the slightly different syntax they could be
   \bool_if_t:Nn <bool> {<true>}
   \bool_if_t_f:Nnn <bool> {<true>} {<false>}
   \bool_if_tt:NNn <bool> <bool> {<arg>}
   \bool_if_tt_tf_ft_ff:NNnnnn <bool> <bool> {<tt>} {<tf>} {<ft>} {<ff>}
which I think isn't so bad at all.
-- 
Morten