On 10/09/2008, at 1:34 AM, Mittelbach, Frank wrote:

> my take is that the recent addition of \def:NNn and firends was  
> already a mistake and should be reverted. These functions provide  
> something which at the expl3 level isn't really needed.

I'm undecided so far. I definitely see your side of the argument.

But it is nice to just write "4" instead of, say, "##1##2##3##4"; less  
characters means more clarity, in this case. Sometimes functions that  
define other functions can get a bit lost in all the octothorps.

On the other hand, it is only "syntactic sugar" for which we're paying  
(not so) precious expansions.

Will