On Aug 12, 2009, at 10:32 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:
if there is more demand for that i can consider making a substituter that operates on the node list in an early stage; that way it is controlled by attributes and there is no interference with macro definitions, reading modules and such Macro interaction may be an issue, but I believe it is still better for transliterations to work on the actual input strings or on tokens. For example, you may want to run macros (like \delimitedtext) on the converted output.
my main concern with that is that one then needs to control precisely where to apply such translations; for instance turning a< into something else might also mess up math and adding all kind of extra checking and housekeeping (for instance when loading modules or whatever in the middle of such a conversion)
of course when the to be converted fragments are tagged it's trivial to use lpeg and avoid \cs's
btw, i think that delimitedtext would work anyway as we only replace "glyph a glyph<" by something else then
anyway, it all depends on the task and hopefully unicode will solve all our problems (and not introduce more)
Well, in my case the fragments are already delimited, so it's relatively easy. However, I wonder whether there are many applications for this. I don't see too many, but maybe I'm wrong. From my POV, there is no need for this in the core, but maybe others see more usage. Thomas