Hello all,

Various issues have been raised on c.t.t concerning expl3, and I'd like 
to address them one at a time here (some of the discussion might be 
quite quick, but I'd like to have a record of which items are "ticked 
off"). As a starter, lets take two issues I hope can be resolved 
relatively easily.

The "num" data type does not really add to "int", and so l3num seems to 
be redundant. I've proposed dropping it entirely, and as this has been 
mentioned again I wonder if there are any good reasons not to.

Second, the lack of a "string" data type came up (I'd imagine a string 
as something \detokenize'd). It seems pretty clear that both strings and 
floating-point numbers need some support in expl3, so I propose adding 
place-holder modules "l3str" and "l3fp" with some text in them saying 
that they will get written at some point. At this stage, I'm not asking 
for any decisions about what they might do, just suggesting that the 
modules themselves should exist (which may well push someone to write them).

(More items to follow in separate threads: there may be a lot of e-mails 
from me.)
-- 
Joseph Wright