At 21:45 +0100 97/10/13, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
> > > by the way, i think that using multiple parameters in this, and other,
> > > macros is not very friendly. why not adopt the keyval syntax, ie
> > >
> > >  \date{communicated=xxxx,revised=xxxx}
...
>If such a spec includes a number of mandatory keywords, a number of
>optional ones but allows classes to add additional keywords that are
>supposed to be ignored by classes not implementing them then this can
>be a big improved. Of course it might also produce chaos if class A
>defines foo to mean X and class B defines foo to mean Y then we are
>back at incompatible classes.

  This can be sorted out by ideas of object orientation: Class A uses local
names A/foo, and class B uses local names B/foo; thus they do not clash.

  So perhaps class or object "article" would define
    \article/communicated   % Date when article is communicated.
    \article/revised        % Date when article is revised.
giving room for class journal to define
    \journal/revised        % Date when journal issue is revised.
putting in the revision dates of the articles in its own
    \journal/article
structure, taking say a number as an argument, so that
    \journal/article5{revised}
might expand to the date article #5 was revised (or something). It is then
possible to hide away the internal "/" structures by environment style
commands.

  I have done programming in this style. -- But I am not sure if TeX
getting slow by long names.

  Hans Aberg
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