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Date:         Tue, 1 Sep 2009 17:40:26 +0200
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From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Lars_Hellstr=F6m?= <Lars.Hellstrom@RESIDENSET.NET>
Subject: Re: template vs template-alt
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <5AEE5632-BCE2-4ED1-8FCA-F882AC15912F@gmail.com>
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Status: R

Will Robertson skrev:
> I'm going to be a bit quiet over the next little while, but after that I 
> may try to put together a "template-alt-alt" along these lines to see 
> how things turn out.

Then I might dig up another idea I had concerning classical template, 
namely to use braces in the names of control sequences implementing 
instances (and other things). Concretely, that could mean we roughly 
(e.g. forgetting about collections for the moment) have the definition

   \cs_set_nopar:Npn \UseInstance #1#2 {
      \use:c{ UseInstance { #1 } { #2 } }
   }

The idea here is that if TeX emits some error message about the macro 
in question, then it will refer to (say) \UseInstance{hj}{flushleft}, 
which tells the casual user where something is going wrong (with the 
flushleft instance of template type hj), even though he may not 
understand how TeX intended the error message to be parsed.

LaTeX2e has something similar going on with font names. TeX's overfull 
hbox messages contain strings like \OT1/cmr/m/it/10 which (if you know 
a bit of NFSS) are fairly easy to interpret as "here we switch to 
medium italic 10pt of OT1-encoded Computer Modern Roman" -- it is not 
so obvious (or relevant) that \OT1/cmr/m/it/10 is also the low-level 
control sequence which when executed will switch to that font.

Lars Hellström