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Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:12:40 +0000
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From: Joseph Wright <joseph.wright@MORNINGSTAR2.CO.UK>
Subject: Re: Passing a dictionary to, for example,  the TOC entry formatter
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
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Status: R

J.Fine wrote:
> Frank:  I don't understand what you mean by 'the overhead of processing'.)

I assume Frank was thinking that we wouldn't want to do everything in a
dictionary manner as some arguments are always needed, and so something
like:

\def\foo@bar#1#2{%
  Title:   #1\\%
  Name:    \DictionaryLookup{#2}{name}\\%
  Address: \DictionaryLookup{#2}{address}\\%
}

will be faster for the explicitly passed #1 than the dictionary items,
independent of how the dictionary is implemented. (I'd assume that a
dictionary would be a single data structure: I'd probably do it as an
expl3 properly list, and then recovering data would certainly add some
processing overhead. However, even a csname expansion as you outline is
an additional overhead compared to an explicitly passed value.)
--
Joseph Wright