[latexrefman] \@var{some-name}

Vincent Belaïche vincent.belaiche at gmail.com
Tue Aug 10 14:52:33 CEST 2021


In some places of the nonofficial reference manual, when an argument
has to be a control sequence, we describe the argument as
\@var{some-name}, eg. node \newsavebox, but in other places, eg. node
\setlength, we just use @var{some-name} and say that @var{some-name}
has to start with \.

I suggest that we do it consistently throughout the manual.
We say something like \@var{some-name} has to be a control sequence
and begins with a \ in normal circumstances.

Maybe the we should have  some node to define what a control sequence
is, and say that any catcode 0 character does the job, not only \, and
then we would refer to this node everywhere we have a
\@var{some-name}. Node \makeatletter could refer to this node.

In node « \newcommand & \renewcommand » we use the term « alphabetic
control sequence » so we should also refer to this new node, and
explain there what an alphabetic control sequence is, as opposed to a
non alphabetic one (see https://elzevir.fr/imj/latex/tips.html#names,
Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard uses the terms control characters and control
words for non-alphabetic and alphabetic control sequences, but I find
« control character » slightly misleading as this term is already
widely used to refer to characters with ASCII code 0 to 31).

  V.



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