Re: system macros/doquadrupleemtpy

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

Aditya, Peter,

as always, thanks a lot for your help. Peter, you're certainly right  
that it's difficult to diagnose my problem - I'm sending only  
snippets, no example. But it's a fairly complex thing here for my  
presentation module and difficult to reduce in size.

On Sep 3, 2008, at 6:58 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

> On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm trying to define a macro \Command which can either have four or
>> five arguments. If it has five, I want to define them as
>>
>> \Command1[#1][#2][#3][#4]{#5}
>>
>> if it has four, as
>>
>> \Command2[#1][#2][#3]{4#}
>>
>> I thought this would be the way to go:
>>
>> \def\Command{%
>> 	\doquadrupleempty\doCommand}
>
> You need something with possibly five arguments so you should use  
> quint
> rather than quad:
>
> \def\Command%
>    {\doquintupleargument\doCommand}
>
>> \def\doCommand{%
>> 	\iffifthargument%
>> 		\doquadrupleargument\Command1%
>> 	\else%
>> 		\dotripleargument\Command2%
>> 	\fi}
>
>
> The usual way is
>
> \def\doCommand[#1][#2][#3][#4][#5]%
>    {\doifelsenothing{#5}%See below
>     {\Command1[#1][#2][#3][#4][#5]}
>     {\Command2[#1][#2][#3][#4]}}
>
> I use \doifelsenothing rather than \doiffirthargument. If I give
>
> \Command[...][...][...][...][] with \doifelsenothing \Commnad2 will be
> called while with \iffifthargument \Command1 will be called. Use  
> whichever
> is more appropriate for your problem.
>
OK, that does make sense, but now I also see where my problem lies.  
When I define

\doCommand[#1][#2][#3][#4]#5

and then have

\Command2[#1][#2][#3]#4

TeX picks up a closing bracket as #4. I suspect that my problem lies  
in the definition \doCommand[#1][#2][#3][#4]#5 . The two definitions  
don't match; when I look at \doCommand, the closing bracket is indeed  
argument #4, from TeX's point of view. Maybe I need to reverse the  
order of my arguments and make it

\doCommand#1[#2][#3][#4][#5] ?

but I'm not sure if this would play with quintupleempty...

Anyway, thanks a lot for your help. I'll look further into it and will  
maybe come back with a real example later if I can't figure it out.

Thomas
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