Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]> writes: >...there is only >one solution that would avoid that kind of deadlock which is to >abandom TeX's parsing mechanism completely and writing your own parser >within TeX (eg by making braces being ordinary characters etc). that >is possible although incredibly slow even on fast machines and to do >more than just a prove of concept type implementation you get >dangerously close to proving that TeX is Turing complete. This is actually one way I contemplated, but I felt the effort not worth it: One idea might be making a new version of the command \def\name<parameter text>{definition text} that picks up the parameter text, and is simulating the parsing TeX normally does, but with suitabnle modifications, passing to some exception text if something goes wrong, or whatever. This is not very easy to do in TeX. One might use such a command, even though slow, in situations where the TeX normal programming does not suffice. Second, if one would want to extend TeX itself, making those extensions first implementable in TeX itself would be a good idea, as it would not force people picking up a new TeX implementation right away. So, even though this is not the group for discussing TeX extensions (it is the group NTS-L Distribution list <[log in to unmask]> ), this might fuse the efforts of the LaTeX3 project, and such extensions efforts. But you won't implement this very easily. Hans Aberg