Will Robertson writes: > 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. yes that's the case for which my argument breaks down a little bit, I agree. But this is rather the exception .. and in most cases where double ## marks show up you are usually doing weird stuff anyway like mixing inner and outer args ... and within that inner definition you still need ## to denote your arguments so ... > On the other hand, it is only "syntactic sugar" for which we're paying > (not so) precious expansions. yeah ... and if people find it really useful ... I don't mind :-) that much it is just that I don't see a need for them 'night frank