On 11/8/2024 6:05 PM, Joseph Wright wrote:

True but when you want half a dozen tokens in an argument, length counts :) We use quite a lot of ";" currently to implement our expandable floating point stuff, and that likely has to stay in macros even in Lua(Meta)TeX for ever - I fear subtle differences from pdfTeX if we tried to implement differently.

sure. (btw, fwiw using \relax as sentinal is faster because there is no pushback needed and and internally - as macro body - a ; or \relax takes the same amount of memory and i suppose most goes into macros but performance and memory consumption is a topic on its own and probably very different between macro packages)

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one should also make sure an expression doesn't scan ahead, if only because it will expand whats coming next; basically \relax or matching () should have been mandate and it's a design flaw.

Arguably yes but e-TeX was finalised in 1999 - that was an discussion for a previous millennium (at least from a plain/LaTeX point of view) :)

as much of tex ..

Indeed - I know you have a different view on how to handle that than the LaTeX one :)

the fact that there was never a fundamental follow-up etex (language wise) kind of tells a story i guess but let's not waste time on that Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------