Hi Sean,

Thanks for your comments here.
Like Frank said earlier, please don’t take any lack of comment from me as disinterest — it’s unfortunately a busy time for me.

On 31 Aug 2014, at 8:22 am, Sean Allred <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Were you able to take a peek at the proposal document I sent out?
> 
>    https://gist.github.com/vermiculus/d8ac080f3f8c7ec2bed6#file-idea-org
> 
> Given the limitations of purely positional arguments, I feel that I make
> a pretty good case for keyval-based arguments.  Presuming the arguments
> against positional arguments are persuasive, the language impurity
> introduced by the hybrid option doesn't sit well with me.

You may well be right on this.


> To clip a bit from the above-mentioned proposal, something like this
> seems most inline with the existing paradigm:
> 
>    \DeclareObjectType { name }
>      {
>        first  : tokenlist ,
>        middle : tokenlist ,
>        last   : tokenlist ,
>        first  : .required ,
>        last   : .required ,
>      }

Correct me if I’m being daft, but doesn’t “requiredness” need to be checked at the template not object level? I guess I’m thinking along the lines of BibTeX here — if an unknown key is given, just ignore it.

Consider perhaps a “frontmatter" object that includes information about affiliations, biographies, photographs, and so on. Depending what type of template you choose to typeset the object, you may or may not end up using the various pieces of information.

Or perhaps both objects and templates need to have a concept of which parameters are required, and only work together if they match appropriately.

Will