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From: max@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Max Hailperin)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: How can I get TeX to see LaTeX \ref{...} as a <number>?
Message-ID: <1990Jul30.204401.22907@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 30 Jul 90 20:44:01 GMT
References: <1538@scott.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 23

In article <1538@scott.ed.ac.uk> lex@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Alexander Holt) writes:
>[I did try <latex-help@sumex-aim.stanford.edu> a month ago, but no
>response]

Please, please, everybody: If you get no response from LaTeX-help in some
reasonable period (maybe a week, certainly not a month), send a note to
LaTeX-help-coordinator@sumex-aim.stanford.edu asking what went wrong.
Sometimes one of the volunteers falls off the face of the earth without
letting the coordinator know.  The only way this gets caught is if a helpful
prosepctive helpee inquires.  At that point, lots of useful things can happen:
the question can be expedited to a non-fallen-off-the-face-of-the-earth helper,
the f-o-t-f-o-t-e helper can be temporarily removed from the round-robin
rotation to prevent further non-responses, and diagnosis can be attempted
to discover what happened to the f-o-t-f-o-t-e helper and reverse the falling.

Oh yes, as to the problem; here's a definition (which should be put in
a file called alphref.sty or such and put in [] in the documentstyle line):
\def\alphref#1{\@ifundefined{r@#1}{?}{\edef\@tempa{\@nameuse{r@#1}}\expandafter
    \expandafter\expandafter\@alph\expandafter\@car\@tempa \@nil\null}}

I've chosen to expand to a ? in the undefined label case; that can be changed.
For an explanation of why on earth so many \expandafter's are needed, see the
second page of Appendix D in the TeXbook.