Am 11.01.25 um 00:19 schrieb Hans Hagen:
Yes, of course, but I’m often surprised by funny characters like #:
Well, there are reasons: It has to fit in the #1 .. #9 approach because these things are stored into tokens, so single character. Then one has to decide on what characters. There's also a performance issue because we don't want to sacrifice too much and these preamble tokens are "parsed" every time a macro is called so they better can be efficient.
In the end only a few users (mostly developers) will see the obscure ones (and understand why some are there). The \optional prefix enables these extensions. It's a bit like: I want to grab arguments with mandate {} and there is something so let's look it up. Or, I bet that one can grab \par's so lets the manual for that.
Thank you for the explanation! I guess you meant \tolerant instead of \optional?
Did you know that we can have #A..#E as well. So 15 parameters instead of 9? I still need to use that more (deep down).
That I knew. At least in mkvi/mklx mode. If I use even 4 params I lose count of them.
Don't worry, you don't want to know what I forget.
Sure. I’m proud to have found several features that you forgot about ;)
I’m not competent enough to rewrite e.g. https://wiki.contextgarden.net/System_Macros/Handling_Arguments
Sigh.
So you haven't reached Wolfgang level yet, and by the time you have, he bumped the scale up again, so don't sigh too much ... won't help, actually your upcoming manual will cover plenty, so more of a hurray.
I’m always aiming for the stars. ;) But my manual can’t be better than me, and I want it to be up to date and helpful – mostly for myself ;-P Yes, I need to read the lowlevel manuals. But after taxes… (Also sigh.) Hraban