> Lastly, I want to state my amazement about David's initial question > > Do you actually know the internals of TeX? > > Why should I? I suggested a user interface! The user should not be > required to know the internals of TeX in order to be able to use > LaTeX3! because of the nature of tex, i'm afraid. > If I want to save a file, I'm happy that I do not have to know > the internals of the file system, how my OS links files, where it > stores its TOC, what access mode it uses, what algoriths it uses to > control the HD arms, how it keeps track of the free disk space and so > on. I am especially thankful that saving a file works just the same > way if I save on floppy disk or a network. about 5 years before tex was released, i wrote a small operating system to support a larger project. that operating system was used for quite a while by people sitting at the teletype console; and in that operating system, you had to know about the layout of the disc hardware. which is not to boast that cambridge research students in those days had lots of hair on their chests... i want merely to point out that tex was designed so long ago that its user interface, and the user interfaces of packages built on it, are bound up with its internals in a way that would be quite unacceptable today. david is right: to make assertions about the way the user interface "will be", you need to know whether your proposal is actually practicable. if any part of your proposal is not practicable, there's a danger that everything you suggest will be ignored, however good _some_ parts of it are. the fact is, that many people complain about the restrictions that tex places on our programming, but no-one is willing to throw out the basis of the "programming model" of tex -- rebuilding tex from scratch is just too much of a job. :-(