🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MANDAL.93Jan5124200@rose.cis.ohio-state.edu> mandal@rose.cis.ohio-state.edu (Manas Mandal) writes:

   [I posted this the day before Christmas, and got no responses. So I am
   trying again, hoping that Someone Out There knows the answer.]

You rang?

   While processing, I want to typeout the current chapter number, so at
   the relevant place, I issue the command \typeout{\thechapter}

   If \thechapter is defined as               I get as output
	   \roman{chapter}                         iii
	   \Roman{chapter}                         \uppercase {iii}

   QUESTION 1::

   Is this a bug in LaTeX? \Roman is not expanded but everything else
   gets displayed properly?

No bug. The \uppercase command is *not expandable* in the
technical sense, and that's the one that counts.

   So how do I force the expansion without changing the definition of
   \@Roman? Can I say something like
	   \typeout{\expand\thechapter}
   so that \thechapter is correctly expanded?

No, because you need more than expansion.
The best I can come up with right now is the following:
	\edef\tmp{\noexpand\typeout{\thechapter}}
	\uppercase\expandafter{\tmp}
which you hide of course in a macro because it's ugly.

(This first generates \tmp as a control sequence that means
 \typeout{iii} , and then you uppercase the whole of that.
The behaviour of \uppercase is often counterintuitive.
See a couple of cute examples in section 3.6.2 of the
book by yours truly.)


--
Victor
``I have seen this funny quote, if only I could find it back.''