the daemon cryeth:

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The following information was provided by the package's contributor.

Name of contribution: expl3 Author's name: The LaTeX Project Author's email: latex-team@latex-project.org Location on CTAN: /macros/latex/contrib/expl3/ Summary description: Low-level LaTeX3 programming conventions License type: lppl

Announcement text given by the package's contributor:

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This release (SVN 2047)

This release addresses a number of specific issues with the expl3 system. Some of these are not back-compatible, but are needed to improve the overall structure and reliability of expl3.

When used with LuaTeX, expl3 includes support for category code tables. This support was used experimentally in setting ExplSyntaxOn and ExplSyntaxOff, but this leads to unexpected issues. This decision has therefore been reversed: category code setting by expl3 itself is the same with all engines.

The choice of quarks as delimiters has been tidied up. These changes are internal, but may show up with existing code that uses internal functions. A particular case is l_head:w and l_tail:w, which are now delimited by q_stop (and not q_nil as earlier).

Prompted by the LuaTeX-specific issue mentioned above, the team has revised the use of other primitives inside expl3. Variation in behaviour between different engines is not desirable for the successful application of expl3. As a result, the team have decided to require the functionality of the pdfstrcmp primitive. This means that the minimum engine requirements for expl3 are now:

• pdfTeX 1.30 or later
• XeTeX 0.9994 or later
• LuaTeX 0.40 or later (0.60 or later strongly recommended)

The l_if_eq:nn(TF) family of comparisons have been heavily revised. There are now two distinct families:

• l_if_eq:nn(TF), a set of non-expandable functions which compare the two input token lists on a token basis.
• str_if_eq:nn(TF), a set of expandable functions which compare the two inputs on string (category-code independent) basis.

Variants of these functions have also been revised: programmers will need to check their code with the new implementation.

Looking ahead, there may be more revisions of specific points as the code is more widely used as as particular issues are addressed. An effort to formalise the documentation will begin shortly, and so another update is likely to take place before November.

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thanks for the upload; i have installed the replacement files, and updated the catalogue repository.

Users may view the package catalogue entry at http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/expl3.html or they may browse the package directory at http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/expl3/

the catalogue entry on the web will change a bit overnight tonight.

Robin Fairbairns

For the CTAN team