Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]> writes: > > But, continuing this theme of non-deterministic parsing, have you tried > > picking up say a whole word in advance, then doing some parsing of it > > (expanding all macros in it, and replacing it with a word where TeX might > > regonize it. > > More explicitly, one would type say > > <foo\a bar> > > Then the "<" would pick up the whole "foo\a bar>", expanding the \a, > > finally returning "foobar". Would it be possible to recognize a ligature > > "ob" by this method? (The example is otherwise entirely hypothetical.) > >it would but on the other hand it would not help as you > > a) need that > character there is not anything you could choose, eg >scanning up to the next space or so is no answer as you would run into >problems inside arguments etc > > b) there is this nasty case of \verb which modifies TeXs parsing and >you would kill that case as well > >so again, unless you make everything "letter" and "other" except for >"\" and the start of shortref strings and essentially build your own >parser for all of the text (with the problem of handling nested groups >etc etc) there is no way to make this work The discussion concerns a somewhat artifical style of programming, but one could think of picking up something bigger, say a sentence or a paragraph in advance. The parser would have some knowledge of when to abort. Perhaps one could do this by the idea of a "text environment". One would then have to write (what semantically corresponds to) \begin{text}...\end{text}\verb... and not \begin{text}...\verb...\end{text} if one wnat that particular feature (ligatures, or whatever). -- Perhaps with an improved syntax. I would not experiment with it myself, but for those willing fakires out there... Hans Aberg