Richard Walker wrote: >Hans Aberg writes: > > The only point with a terminating ":" would be to make it easier > > to know where the argspec ends if one processes the command > > name. ... >Hmm . . . at this stage let's say that an argspec can only contain >A-Z and a-z. Then the argspec is the longest contiguous sequence of >letters after the colon - easily specified with a regular expression. Easier in TeX, that is (like in the example program below). If I am allowed to write my own parser, it makes no difference, of course. ------------------------------------------------------------------- \catcode`\:=11 \catcode`\@=11 \def\foo:A{foo and A} \def\getargspec#1{\expandafter\@getargspec\string#1} \catcode`\:=12 \def\@getargspec#1#2:#3{Command ``#2'' has argspec #3!} \catcode`\:=11 \getargspec\foo:A \end -------------------------------------------------------------------