[texinfo-pretest] comma in @node or @float line

[Karl Berry]

    Does TeX have a mechanism for quoting special characters (sorry for my
    ignorance), and if so, can we borrow it, or some variant of it, for
    Texinfo?

Not in the Unix sense.  Every character's meaning is changeable, which
is part of the problem -- in Texinfo, the same text gets used in so many
different contexts (typesetting, writing to aux file, reading from aux
file, etc.).  The original texinfo.tex made tons of assumptions to
simplify the TeX code, and we've been playing catch-up with the bugs
ever since.

    > I think allowing certain commands in node names is a better approach.
    As someone who did that, I think it's something to stay away of ;-)

I hear you, and believe me, I'm not looking forward to it, but I don't
see a viable alternative to supporting languages other than English.

Although we need to support 8-bit characters too, I no longer think that
would suffice, since many symbols would remain inaccessible.  Besides,
7-bit documents are often preferable for authors -- easier to mail
around and everything else.

If we ever officially support some @-commands in node names, then we can
support @comma{} as one of the simpler possibilities, and voila, commas
can be allowed in node names without any need to resort to fancier
methods.

So much to do, so little time ...

k