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
