As a special subject related (or currently related at least) to the language discussion we have the syntax and semantics of shortrefs. a couple of thoughts are written down below and i would be interested in hearing your comments and your own thoughts on that subject frank \section{Short references} With the development of language packages and later on within the Babel system it became common practise to extend the markup language of \LaTeX{} using so called ``shortrefs'' as a compact method for inputting certain commands. Shortrefs are character sequences that do not start with \TeX's escape character, i.e., usually `|\|', but nevertheless act like commands. That is, they do not represent the equivalent glyph sequence but have either additional side effects (like the punctuation marks in french typography producing additional space) or even denote completely different actions (e.g., |""| for a break point without a hyphen). In addition to the above shortrefs some \TeX{} fonts implement shortrefs by using (or misusing) the ligature mechanism to implement input arbitrary input syntax, e.g., |``| generating `` or |---| generating an emdash. \subsection{Possible application areas} Short references can be used for different purposes: \begin{itemize} \item providing a compact input notation for commonly used textual commands such as characters with diacritical marks \item providing a compact and readable input notation for special applications, e.g., |==>| for |\Longrightarrow| \item providing typographical features not otherwise supported (e.g., extra space in front of punctuation characters) \end{itemize} The first two items are related to input syntax and not directly linked to the language of the current text although historically they have been provided by language packages, e.g., |"a| as a shortref for |\"{a}| was implemented by |german.sty| and within Babel its meaning gets deactivated within regions marked up as belonging to other languages. The third item is language related, e.g., used to implement a certain typography style without forcing the user to mark up its document specially. \subsection{Implementation} Within the framework of \TeX{} shortrefs have to be implemented by making the first character in the sequence active (which means that this character alone already behaves like a command). To implement shortref sequences a clever mechanism has to be introduced that somehow looks ahead to determine which of the following characters (if any) still belong to the sequence and the after determining that launching the associated action. This approach can have undesired side effects with other \TeX{} typesetting actions. If the implemented mechanism for determining the shortref sequence is not fully expandable it will prevent \TeX{} from inserting ligature or kerning information between preceding characters and characters produced by the action finally launched, e.g., if |"a| is a shortref to produce the single glyph ``\"a'' then a word like |F"alle| will show no ligature between ``F'' and ``\"a'' even if the font contains such a ligature. On the other hand the disadvantage of using a fully expandable shortref mechanism is that shortref sequences have to be assembled using arguments which means that spaces between shortref chars will not be significant and shortref characters at the end of a brace group might produce nasty \TeX{} errors. \subsection{Discussion} The above means that the shortref mechanism either has to be fully expandable or that one can't use it to produce glyphs that might play a part in ligature or kerning tables. Since Babel 3.6 this mechanism isn't any longer expandable which poses a serious problem for several language packages using this mechanism. It is questionable if any shortref mechanism should be directly linked to language tags even if the use of shortrefs might be traditionally linked to certain languages. In other words if a document is mainly in German shortrefs for producing German umlauts should probably be still available within quotations in other languages. Even if the usual meaning of a shortref sequence differs for two languages it seems advisable to at least make it customizable whether or not the switch from one language to the other affects the current set of shortref definitions. For shortrefs that implement typographical features the same applies since for a document written in, say, French, the designer might reasonably decide that these conventions are implemented throughout the document even for portions written in other languages (such as quotations).