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From: ajcd@cs.ed.ac.uk (Angus Duggan)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: defining active characters by number
Keywords: active characters
Message-ID: <157@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Aug 90 19:50:33 GMT
Sender: nnews@cs.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: ajcd@cs.ed.ac.uk (Angus Duggan)
Followup-To: comp.text.tex
Organization: Edinburgh University Fried Brain Carry-out
Lines: 28

I'm flummoxed. I've searched through the TeXbook for an answer to this
problem, and tried everything I can think of, but I can't find an answer. I
want to make a character active, and define a macro for it, with only the
number of the character specified (in a count register).

What I'm trying to do is to set up a lot of the character codes from 128--255
to call a common macro, with the number of the character code as a parameter.
I'd prefer to have a loop, something like:

\bgroup % localise \count0
  \count0=161
  \loop
    \expandafter\global\expandafter\catcode\count0=\active
    % \edef active character number \count0 to expand to:
    % {\noexpand\macro{\the\count0}}
    \advance\count0 by 1
  \ifnum\count0<255\repeat
\egroup

The only way I can see of doing this is writing out an auxiliary file, and
re-reading it. Somebody please show me that I'm wrong.

A.
==
Angus Duggan, Department of Computer Science,	| Ignorance of the manual is
University of Edinburgh, JCMB,			| no excuse.
The King's Buildings, Mayfield Road,		| JANET:  ajcd@uk.ac.ed.lfcs
Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, Scotland.	| OR:  ajcd%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk