Re: Defining command with optional and mandatory arguments

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi,

> Arguments in brackets are always optional (if I don’t misunderstand), depending on your own logic (\if*argument, \ifempty etc.)

The original intent was for user-level commands to have square brackets
for arguments setting things up, and curly braces for arguments that
are actually typeset. That is where commands like \in come from, where
the braced part is optional and the bracketed part required.

Internal low-level commands tended to use braces more often because
of efficiency considerations. (also, at the primitive level, TeX syntax
is inconsistent anyway, with various primitives having quite different
syntactical conventions). Nowadays, this is less relevant, with lots
of stuff handled by lua instead.

Best wishes,
Taco



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