MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
References: <AFA791BD-820C-4762-AF99-680B5A3DFA07@gmail.com>
            <4936E30A.5080209@morningstar2.co.uk>
            <87ljuxlybp.fsf@fawkes.hogwarts>
            <039B3783CD514B509970052B8B93789E@JavierPC>
            <27990a880812040533x3316ce17n3e5ae0777b9590c@mail.gmail.com>
            <031B4E01889C40D384D5F3F50B32C65A@JavierPC>
            <49383B0C.7000601@morningstar2.co.uk>
            <6CA3DEBB6DE04310AF22DBADD1AA1EB9@JavierPC>
Message-ID:  <18745.39676.338482.861341@morse.mittelbach-online.de>
Date:         Fri, 5 Dec 2008 22:19:56 +0100
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
From: Frank Mittelbach <frank.mittelbach@LATEX-PROJECT.ORG>
Subject: Re: expl3 "token list" terminology
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <6CA3DEBB6DE04310AF22DBADD1AA1EB9@JavierPC>
Precedence: list
Status: R

Javier Bezos writes:
 > Joseph,
 > 
 > > My take, as an outsider looking in, is that although there are always
 > > ways to improve things, the current expl3 is not too bad at all.  If
 > > LaTeX3 is ever going to be more than a collection of interesting coding
 > > ideas for TeX programmers, there does need to be a delivery point. That
 > 
 > On the contrary, the code is wonderful. My complaint isn't the
 > code itself, but the syntactic conventions.

but even the conventions are something that needs to be frozen at some point.

I'm perfectly willing to go one more round on topics like

 - name structure
 - argument spec

but I doubt that I'm going to be in favor of very radical changes unless they
are extremely convincing (and extremely convincing means convincing me beside
others and getting old i probably get stuborn (more than I was when I was 20
and depending on whom you ask that level was always high :-)

I agree with you that arg spec is getting (and got) in the wrong direction,
too many letters too much encoded in convention. This needs one more serious
round of discussions and thought. However, beside "perfect" conventions one
also always has to think about the look and feel of the resulting code, e.g.,
even if it is more logical perhaps to use "t" and "f" for true and false
branches "T" and "F" work better because they stand out and that is what you
need for these arguments.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. I first want to table all suggestions and
put them side by side to allow for sensible comparison

frank