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From: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Alternatives to \cdots and \ldots
Message-ID: <1990Sep24.060252.10747@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 24 Sep 90 06:02:52 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Reply-To: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
Organization: U.C. Berkeley
Lines: 31

Instead of typing the rather clumsly-looking 
$$ 
  D( x_1 + \cdots + x_n, x_1^2 + \cdots + x_n^2, \ldots, x_1^n + \cdots + x_n^n)
$$
I'd prefer to write something like
$$
  D( x_1 + -- + x_n, x_1^2 + -- + x_n^2, __, x_1^n + -- + x_n^n)
$$
(The reason is that "\cdots " and "\ldots " draw attention away from 
the rest of the expression.  I happen to believe that unimportant 
parts of expressions should not look more impressive than 
the important parts.)

Now, thinking myself a TeXnician, I thought of saving away the original
minus sign via |\let\min@s=-|, then setting the mathcode of |-| to "8000.
The new active |-| peeks ahead via |\futurelet| to see if the next token is
another minus sign.  So far so good.

The trouble is that if the macro decides that it is just a plain old
minus sign, I can't typeset that minus sign because TeX keeps converting
the catcode of my |-| token (even the one that |\min@s| saved away) back
into a |-|_{13} because of the funky mathcode.  So now minus signs
are completely inaccessible.  (Nevermind that I can't even do
|\advance\ht0 by-5pt| from math mode any more because |\futurelet| is
handled by the stomach, not the gullet.)

Any takers?

P.S.  In the meantime, I'm using |@| as my character with the funky mathcode, 
and using |@_| and |@-| as my abbreviations for |\ldots| and |\cdots|.  
It works, but it isn't as pretty.