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Subject:
From:
Hendri Adriaens <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 13 Oct 2004 09:18:53 +0200
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Hi Frank,

>  - the strength of the exp module, e.g. the fact that many of the
> expansion
>    tricks that typically a TeX source vanish, e.g.
>
>    \let:NN \foo \bar        let one token to another token
>
>    \let:cc {foo-#1}{bar-#2} let two tokens both generated from strings ->
>                             csnames to each other

Yes, this is indeed very useful.

> now how often do you need :w commands?
>
> if you look at the low-level module code that comes with expl3
> itself or if
> you think about parsing applications like xkeyval one might get
> the impression
> that this happens very often

Yep :)

> but in any other circumstances the
> number is very
> very low indeed.
>

> my (not quite finished) conversion of the xor package has used on
> 9 lines some
> :w macros  (all of which are actually fixes to expl3 code) and the whole
> package has current 7947 code lines (excluding documentation)
>
> template.sty (in the converted version) has 26 left out of 526
> code lines most
> of which are stuff like
>
> \exp_after:NN \show \cs:w ... \cs_end:
>
> where simply the functionality in epxl3 is missing ,ie where the
> correction
> form would be something like
>
>  \cs_show:N      ( = \show)
>
> and the above would then turn into
>
>  \cs_show:c {...}

I see. Thanks for this clarification.

> so all in all my experience is that this is only really used in the very
> low-level modules that set up data structures like queues and
> those that deal
> with special parsing of special input syntax

Indeed, with parsing stuff, one might need a lot of :w, but it
is good to know that this is not necessary too much in actual
applications, which is important to make the system informative.

Thanks for your detailed explanation. Best regards,
-Hendri.

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