beside "my please stop mail" i do want to explain why i think that a module/submodule concept as suggested by Hans is doomed to failure if applied all levels of programming within TeX. essentially i said this already in my mail a few days ago but perhaps it was not clear enough to people not having written large scale low-level TeX. Richard suggested at some point a syntax like \foo/bar_baz:nn and said "with catcode 11 for / _ :" now that is beside syntactic sugar exactly what we have now (where the statement is: the module name is the first word up to an _) it may be that this is better to read (although i doubt)[1] it but it is not functionally offering anything new. and importantly it doesn't offer what Hans has in mind (even though in some side remarks it sounds as if he thinks one can combine the two)[2] one of the main arguments for submodules (or class structures in OO languages) is the ability to overload functions/procedures and here is where it stops being usable. if the concept allows for this than at runtime! the binding has to be changed and that means: any expansion text of any macros can't contain something like \foo/bar_baz:nn as above (ie a token) but it must contain things that live on the module/submodule level ie is looked up by some internally programmed module handling interface. and that will bring you to my exponential growth in slowness. i'm not going to repeat the other arguments about loosing the basic expansion mechanism etc, which are at the heart of the low-level functionality of TeX. so while i think that the ideas itself are relevant to TeX, i'm strongly convinced that they are relevant only to a high-level language for producing the user interface, ie the document level. and that level should not at all deal with expand_after stuff or other low-level TeX rubbish and consequentially there is no reason that these languages should look the same or nearly the same if their concepts are completely different. frank [1] and i don't think people should make too fast statements on this without actually having worked with the language as is [2] as i said several times: *prove* me wrong by giving me something that i can run through initex which works, ie compiles at least simple documents without needing a minute per page --- don't try to prove me wrong by using applying gut-feeling from experiences in languages like C++, Smalltalk, Java, Modula, you name it. We have heard these arguments by now and we agree about their usefulness but we claim (from our experience) that they can't and shouldn't be applied to that level in TeX.