Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!emory!mephisto!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!sot-ecs!spqr From: spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: Why is there no seperator in TeX/LaTeX Message-ID: Date: 19 Aug 90 20:30:26 GMT References: <1990Aug16.214657.16764@sctc.com> <6433@milton.u.washington.edu> Sender: spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk Distribution: comp Organization: Southampton University Computer Science Lines: 16 In-reply-to: charlie@milton.u.washington.edu's message of 17 Aug 90 01:55:42 GMT That's it. A backslash and one or more upper or lower case letters or a backslash and a single character. Nothing else can be a control sequence. How could it be stated any clearer? this is utter cobblers, with all due respect. to use a character as a part of a control sequence is simply a matter of changing its catcode. the defaults of plain TeX are not all there is to life. definining a macro called \This-One calls for changing the catcode of -. It wouldnt surprise me a bit if this has repercussions, but you can do it. in TeX 3.0, you can use any of 256 characters for whatever purpose you wish. -- Sebastian Rahtz S.Rahtz@uk.ac.soton.ecs (JANET) Computer Science S.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Bitnet) Southampton S09 5NH, UK S.Rahtz@sot-ecs.uucp (uucp)