[luatex] Manipulating arguments

[Joseph Wright]

Hello all,

A couple of things have come up on the LaTeX-L list (readers of that
list will soon spot where) that I'd like to get a feel of in a LuaTeX
context. Both are to do with arguments.

1) How does Lua affect TeX argument parsing.  Is it possible, for
example, to use LuaTeX to allow the currently impossible LaTeX:

\footnote{\verb|%|}

2) Can Lua be used to replace numbered arguments with names ones (at
least when delimited argument are not needed):

\def\foo #text{Stuff using #text}

(A bonus question for people with the correct knowledge: is ConTeXt Mark
IV still using TeX to do basic parsing of input at the user level, or
does it actually use Lua and just look like TeX, i.e. using Lua as a
pure scripting language to read user data into an internal normalised
format?)
-- 
Joseph Wright