One aspect of the nitty gritty details of TeX is the fact that its programming language (though turing- complete) leaves a lot to be desired in real life. In 1998  the LaTeX3 team got together with people from ConTeXt and NTS and eTeX to have a closer look at control functions we all would like to see  available in the base language.

Unfortunately, we never got further than starting to specify what we wanted in the language --- nothing got never implemented in a next version of eTeX.

So in this thread we went over the old ideas and tried to classify them according to importance given the information we have 7 years later (and also adding additional material where we thought it appropriate).