Re: [help-texinfo] preferred way to change output for a macro

[Karl Berry]

    me to view @whatever intentionally rather than imperatively

It is!  The whole meaning of "intensional" typesetting is that you don't
care what the output is.  @var means "metasyntactic variable", so it
should be used that way.  I'm sure we're in agreement on that :).

It's when you want to impose a particular format on the output that
things become "imperative".  Of course it is not unreasonable to want a
different style (especially for something as quasi-standard as angle
brackets for metavars), it is simply beyond what Texinfo was originally
designed to do.

All output customizations are a break with the original idea of "say
what it is and not how you want it to look".  As I said in another
thread yesterday, Texinfo was never intended to be a general-purpose
typesetting language where you can get output of whatever kind is
desired.

Anyway, Patrice and I are discussing again the warning when redefining
Texinfo commands.

Best,
karl