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Article #1732Why is there no seperator in TeX/LaTeX
From: William R. Herndon
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 1990 21:46
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 1990 21:46
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1805 bytes
I am curious as to why, in the design of TeX/LaTeX, no character
exists that can be used as a seperator in the names of macros.
After reading the TeXBook section on character codes and classes, I
thought that the hypen would be the character to use. After all it
can be used in labels ( using the \label \ref commands ), and is not
called out as a reserved character.
Well, I was wrong. After defining about 500 macros, all of which had
hyphens in them to help improve the readability of the names, I discovered
much to my dismay that TeX obviously does accord some special meaning to
the hyphen character and won't allow definitions with the hyphen in
them.
So now what am I to do. There appearantly exists no character that can
be used as a seperator, and I need one for clarity. I guess that I've
learned my lesson and will no longer take anything that the TeXBook
states at face value again.
Arrrggggghhhhhhh!!!!!
- Max
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William R. Herndon
Secure Computing Technology Corp. The opinions expressed are
mine, ALL MINE! HEH, HEH,
herndon@sctc.com HEH, HEH!!!
(612) 482-7431
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rutgers!ub.d.umn.edu!cs.umn.edu!msi-s0.msi.umn.edu!sctc.com!herndon From: herndon@sctc.com (William R. Herndon) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Why is there no seperator in TeX/LaTeX Message-ID: <1990Aug16.214657.16764@sctc.com> Date: 16 Aug 90 21:46:57 GMT Distribution: comp Organization: Secure Computing Technology Corporation Lines: 32