At 14:58 +0100 98/06/25, Philip Taylor (RHBNC) wrote: >>> I guess there will be a command called \tex_def or \tex/def or something, >>> which one can use. > >Indeed, that was my very point : David was suggesting that \def could >be made inaccessible by the format; I argued that all the while TeX lacks >the equivalent of PostScript's "bind", primitives which are used by >maos defined in the format source and which must be accessible to >the user code can never be made totally inaccessible. You can "hide" >them but you can't remove them, so why bother even to hide them if an astute >programmer can work his way around the hiding mechanism? I think the idea should be to help indicating objects proper use. >(the earlier proposal to use commercial-at is just one way of hiding such > things, neither better nor worse (in this context) than any other mechanism). For use with modules, my suggestion is that @ should be used for indicating that a command is "private" or "protected", that is not for external use of that module. So the command should then be named \tex/def and not \tex/@def, as some other module is going to use it, like other modules defining \<module name>/new. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[log in to unmask]> * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/> * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>