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Message-ID:  <7255173980814043.WA.blflatexgmail.com@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de>
Date:         Sat, 8 Jan 2011 08:25:36 +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: Bruno Le Floch <blflatex@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Verbatim and xparse (yet again :)
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
Precedence: list
Status: R

Dear all,

As those who have followed the list for some time know, there were 
discussions of introducing verbatim arguments in xparse. This was rejected
for a very good reason: if the verbatim-like commands are not having the 
first look at the argument, then comment characters and spaces have been 
lost irretrievably. Thus, the user has to be made aware that nesting is a 
problem for verbatim. The proposal I describe below forces the user to 
explicitly indicate that the command that he is using will contain verbatim 
text.


Namely, in the package `cprotect.dtx`, I introduced the command 
`\cprotect` that acts somehow like a prefix: the argument of the 
following macro is read verbatim, and `\scantoken`ed when it 
is used. A typical example of use is

\cprotect \section { Title \cprotect \footnote { Foot \verb|^^|. } }

This will put the expected verbatim in a footnote attached to the section 
called "Title". This works in moving arguments (e.g. Table of Contents). 
So far, the implementation (is dirty and) only works for one argument. I 
plan to extend it to any command declared using xparse.


It might be possible to do error checking: each `\cprotect` should check 
somehow that it is "at the top" (i.e., it is the first one to look at its 
argument), or that it is within a `\cprotect`ed command. 
   Any idea how to do that?
If the error checking fails, throw an error, and try to recover by using the
harmless character sequences mentionned a few times in the past on this
list.


For the syntax, the naive thing is to simply get `\cprotect` to  grab all 
the arguments verbatim, and reread them when needed, but for 
performance reasons, it could be better to say explicitly for each 
argument whether it needs `\cprotect`ion. Any suggestions for the 
syntax in this case? 


Best regards,
Bruno Le Floch,
new to the list.


PS: Also, a small crazy idea (I see no practical application for that):
In LaTeX3, we can generate variants of macros with different types 
of arguments (using \cs_generate_variant:Nn). Could/should the 
same thing be done at the layer above? In other words, should it be 
possible to take a DocumentCommand, and change the delimiters, or 
change an argument from being optional to being mandatory, or from 
being mandatory to being  optional with default, ...?