[texhax] Fwd: Re: inovoke command without backslash ?

[Uwe Lück]

Strange that the list was not addressed -- Uwe.

>Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:49:20 +0100
>To: Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com>
>From: Uwe Lück <uwe.lueck at web.de>
>Subject: Re: [texhax] inovoke command without backslash ?
>
>At 16:32 03.03.10, Herbert Schulz wrote:
>>On Mar 3, 2010, at 9:17 AM, Uwe Lück wrote:
>> > At 07:13 03.03.10, Goebel, Juergen wrote:
>> >> wawan  wrote:
>> >>
>> >> > is it possible in Tex/latex, call a command without "\"
>> >> > for example, I have several symbols \stop ( stoping symbol) 
>> \goehead ( goe had sybol) etc.
>> >>
>> >> AFAICS no. How would TeX know whether you want to set the word 'stop'
>> >> or use the command 'stop'? You always need an escape character for that.
>> >
>> > Has anybody mused about or tried using ^^M and blank space as escape char?
>> >
>> > Another approach: ^^M and blank space active, emulating an escape char
>> > or TeX's tokenizing (using \ifcat11=).
>[...]
>>Just curious...
>
>Yes, it's just curiousity ...
>
>>what would that do to paragraph formatting? Aren't you removing most of 
>>the available stretch/shrink?
>>
>>Good Luck,
>
>You mean because "Hello world!" becomes "\Hello\world!"? But this way we 
>would experience quite a few "undefined" errors. I do not claim that using 
>blank space as escape could be a more comfortable (La)TeX, rather it could 
>be useful for local purposes.
>
>1. For wawan: I think in large portions of his code, he generates each 
>glyph by a command, so
>
>      alpha beta gamma  delta epsilon
>
>or more clearly
>
>      alpha beta gamma space delta epsilon
>
>may be more comfortable than
>
>     \alpha\beta\gamma\ \delta\epsilon
>
>or
>
>     \alpha\beta\gamma\space\delta\epsilon
>
>This mode of "characters/glyphs only" may need be ended by a certain command
>
>      ReturnToUsualMode
>
>(\ReturnToUsualMode)
>
>2. The issue caught my interest because I have sometimes thought of 
>defining a script language (that does not need any escape characters, just 
>as "normal" programming languages) merely by TeX macros. Just locally, 
>there would be a "script reading mode" for comfortably defining control 
>macros where you could type
>
>    for i = 1 to n
>
>in place of
>
>    \@fornum \@forvar=1\@forto\@forlast
>
>or so. Maybe for a LuaTeX where Lua is implemented by TeX macros.
>
>Cheers,
>
>     Uwe.