Joseph, > I'll revise what I have, in that case. I'm getting the hang of this, > honestly! nice (that getting the hand of it I mean :-); if people like you seriously start playing with it we should be able to sort out the rough edges and provide additional stuff fairly fast. > > it is a bit like the newcount newcounter discussion yeaterday > > ... \def:NNn is kind of an attempt to carry more or less "user-level" > > functions into the language and they don't belong there > > On the counter discussion, you'll see (in xnotes2bib) I've stuck with > the low-level variant but needing to make it available to the user. I > hope this is the right idea. what we really need to do is to provide a user level interface for that, that then can be reused at package level for offering user accessible counters > As I've said, I'm asking to understand things. which is great frank