Hi Hans! thanks for response.
Hello,
I suppose the issue was discussed before but couldn't find that is archives.
Making high level macros in (pure) TeX encounters problem of optionality[...]
in the previosu century taco made some extensiong dealing with key/val parsing (and other kinds of parsing); at that time we did quite some testing with speed issues, and the price to pay was higher that the gain; keep in mind that in tex catcodes and expansion always kind of interfere in such things;
Indeed, to keep things consistent, parameter text should always be expanded before being swallowed by \macro... Anyway, pdfTeX handles that somehow, supporting both expansion and catcoding.
ok, if you limit key/val parsing to 'strings' only (i.e. no expansion, no catcode support) then it can be faster, but at the same time it also becomes useless for everyday usage; as with more tex things, because tex is rather optimized, hard coded alternatives (extensions to the language) not always pay off; also consider implementation issues like namespacing, scope of keys, etc
...and parameters handling rules in such an extention would probably be faaaar away from TeX. But if tries has been made in previous century, meybe it's high time to repeat tests? In the previous century features such as decompressing/recompressing PNG in runtime didn't pay off either. If you don't consider it doable, I will reopen the request in the next century. -) All the best, -- Pawe/l Jackowski P.Jackowski@gust.org.pl