To begin with, I should explain that I have written a package xdoc2 (second prototype for xdoc) which reimplements quite a lot of the features defined in the doc package and adds a few of its own; the most important of the new features is probably the class writer's interface for defining new commands analogous to \DescribeMacro and new environments analogous to the macro environment. xdoc2 can be found on CTAN in macros/latex/exptl/xdoc. This is said more as a bibliographic reference than an announcement (although I suspect that this list might have the largest concentration of people who might be interested in this package that you can find anywhere on the net), as my real reason for writing this mail is to share some ideas cencerning xparse that I've got from developing xdoc---thus continuing the debate on xparse of September--October last year. The reason there is any relation at all is that I have included an argument-grabbing mechanism very similar to that of xparse in xdoc2. This is not as strange as it might seem, since many of the basic doc commands actually do grab their arguments in various special ways and setting up a mechanism for doing this is a more concise solution than leaving it as in doc; there \macro and \environment contain nine tokens each, the first eight of which are identical! I didn't bother implementing an argument specification interpreter; it's not essential for the functionality and the argument grabbing should probably be implemented using the argument grabber in xparse eventually anyway. (What's more, I have no idea about what would be a reasonable specifier for some of the argument types I've used.) Most of the variation between the argument types defined in xparse lies in what is considered to be the argument---is it a primitive TeX undelimited argument, is it bracket-delimited, is it parenthesis-delimited, or is it just some given character?---but the commands in the doc package show little variation in that respect; all arguments are mandatory. Instead there is another factor which is of utmost importance for many doc commands: that they can control the catcodes that are in force when the argument is grabbed. In doc v2.0h I count 18 user level commands/environments that take arguments, and 8 of these modify the catcodes for some argument. Is catcode-changing hard to incorporate in the xparse argument grabber, then? Not at all. If the list of argument grabbers contains something like \begingroup\MakePrivateLetters\expandafter\endgroup\@ddc@m rather than a simple \@ddc@m, then it will grab one mandatory argument whilst having catcodes temporarily changed as indicated by \MakePrivateLetters. How such a catcode-changing argument should be specified to \DeclareDocumentCommand is of course another matter. One possibility would be as M{<code for changing catcodes>} I cannot recall ever seeing any case of an optional or other special form argument in which the catcodes were being changed (maybe because it is trickier to implement), so I suspect that it would be sufficient to provide this feature for mandatory arguments. It is not clear that such an argument type should be available by default in xparse just because a couple of doc commands has such arguments, but there are some commands in the LaTeX kernel which also have arguments of this type---namely \index, \glossary, \DeclareFontShape, and \DeclareFontEncoding (while searching for such commands I also noticed that \ProvidesFile actually is an example of a command that does catcode trickeries for its optional argument). This argument type might also be called in question on the grounds that it might encourage poor programming style---e.g. constructing commands so that they only work if the arguments are tokenized with special catcodes, and thus are useless for basing other commands on---but I cannot see anything bad in the use of catcode-changing in the \index command. In xdoc2 I also found it useful to feed the argument that was grabbed through some function before it is contributed to the list of arguments, i.e., instead of a grabber \@ddc@m whose pseudocode is \@ddc@m GRABBERS \toks@ ARG == BEGIN \toks@ := \toks@ * {ARG} GRABBERS \toks@ END I use a grabber (\@ddc@mf say) whose pseudocode is \@ddc@mf FUNC GRABBERS \toks@ ARG == BEGIN TEMP := FUNC(ARG) \toks@ := \toks@ * {TEMP} GRABBERS \toks@ END where `FUNC' is some function. If the argument is expected to be for example a number, dimen, or glue one could let FUNC consist of evaluating this quantity, e.g. \reserved@skip=#2\relax \toks@=\expandafter{\the\expandafter\toks@ \expandafter{\the\reserved@skip}}% #1\toks@ The FUNC function could alternatively be an "evaluate calc-style expression". By doing such evaluations in the argument grabber, one can use temporary variables in the arguments without having to worry about whether they are used in the definition of the command you are using as well. It would also provide consistency; if you define a command whose replacement text is something like ... <use value of #1> ... <lots of code, perhaps an \input> ... <use value of #1> ... then you usually expect #1 to have the same value in both places. In xdoc2 the function FUNC is rather something called \MakeHarmless which takes a piece of TeX code and breaks it down to (a robust and makeindex-friendly representation of) the characters TeX's eye would have scanned to produce that TeX code. That is probably not something which should be incorporated in xparse; it rather illustrates the usefulness of allowing using package-defined functions for processing arguments. I have no idea how an argument like that should be specified, though. Lars Hellström