Re: TeX syntax?

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>Joseph H Allen wrote:


>> I made my own preprocessor/format for TeX based on these books. I
>> remember playing a lot of games with the macro name space. For
>> example, only a limited character set can be used in macro names, but
>> I wanted to use any character. I ended up escaping: AA maps to A, AB
>> maps to backslash, AC to {, etc.


>Just about any character can be used in macro names if one really
>wants to do it. LaTeX uses @ in many of its internal names, by
>first changing the catcode of @ to letter, then defining macros
>with @ in the names, or references to those macros. After
>defining all the internal macros, it changes @ back to other.


This is getting off-topic, but may be useful information for those
wanting to use TeX as a back-end- certainly there is a good
possibility that compiler writers would be consulted for such a task
:-)


I wanted to have any user defined string in a macro name, so it is not
practical to play evil catcode games. Incidentally, this is for
writing cross reference data as a set of macro definitions to an
auxiliary file.


I was writing the pre-processor, so it was very easy to just remap
characters in the way I describe above. Later, I learned a more
conventional way to do this using \meaning (which is more or less how
\label{} and \ref{} in LaTeX work):


Create a macro called "\a \_$" without messing with the catcodes:


\expandafter\def\csname \meaning a\meaning \meaning \\meaning _\meaning $\endcsname{test}


Expand it:


This is a \csname \meaning a\meaning \meaning \\meaning _\meaning $\endcsname.


The TeX Book would say something like:


Exercise for the reader: create macro \label{foo_} which
writes "\expandafter\def\csname \meaning f\meaning o\meaning o\meaning _\endcsname{12}"
(where 12 is the current page number) to the .aux file.


Also write the matching \ref{}.


Extra points: have \meaning appear only on characters which are not letters.


--
/* jhallen@world.std.com AB1GO */ /* Joseph H. Allen */
int a[1817];main(z,p,q,r){for(p=80;q+p-80;p-=2*a[p])for(z=9;z--;)q=3&(r=time(0)
+r*57)/7,q=q?q-1?q-2?1-p%79?-1:0:p%79-77?1:0:p<1659?79:0:p>158?-79:0,q?!a[p+q*2
]?a[p+=a[p+=q]=q]=q:0:0;for(;q++-1817;)printf(q%79?"%c":"%c\n"," #"[!a[q-1]]);}

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