Re: wrong new indices accepted

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Apr 08, 2006 at 05:56:10PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> It's good the manual says that only two-letter names are allowed.  I
> think that's all we should consider ok.  It definitely has to be only
> letters -- it would be hard or impossible to implement the command names
> for anything else in TeX.

Moreover anything else than letters doesn't make much sense.

> We could conceivably allow shorter or longer index names.  The current
> texi2dvi supports that, although older versions do not, and I imagine
> the long-standing idiom
>   texindex foo.??
> is ingrained in some people's memory.  Do you think allowing
> shorter/longer names is worthwhile?  I don't have strong feelings one
> way or the other.

I think that longer should be allowed, this may allow for more intuitive
index names. Maybe shorter could be reserved for the predefined indices, 
but on the other hand it is easier to remember one letter when placing 
the @*index commands in a doc so one letter index name could also be 
allowed. But then there is the conflict with default indices which have
one letter index commands and 2 letter names.

--
Pat