What is the difference between \let and \def?

Question

What is the difference between the \let and \def commands in TeX/LaTeX?

Ideally please provide a simple example that will illustrate the difference between them.

Answer 1

The difference is in the time at which the ‘right hand side’ is evaluated.

Thus \let\foo\bar defines \foo to have the value that \bar had at the point of definition. On the other hand, \def\foo{\bar} in effect defines \foo to have the value that \bar has at the point of use.

Consider:

\def\bar{hello}
\let\fooi\bar
\def\fooii{\bar}
\fooi +\fooii

\def\bar{goodbye}
\fooi +\fooii

This produces

hello+hello
hello+goodbye

---

This is a simple process.

However it's also a subtle one, so it might be worth highlighting a few key points:

• When TeX encounters control sequences such as \fooi, it evaluates them; if these are macros (that is, they have been defined by \def, or \let equal to something which was defined by \def), then the result is that they will expand to other tokens, which TeX will then examine in turn, and so on, recursively, until what's left is either ‘primitive’ control sequences or letters (I'm simplifying a little bit).

• \fooi expands directly to the characters hello (because \bar initially did, and \fooi was defined to have the same value).

• \fooii, in contrast, expands to \bar, which is then immediately reexamined and reexpanded. In the first case, \bar expands to hello and in the second case to goodbye. The definition of \fooii hasn't changed, but \bar has been redefined in between.

• Getting a clear idea of the process of this recursive expansion is very helpful when learning how to develop and debug TeX macros.

Answer 2

While the existing answers are all true I like to highlight one point which wasn't explicitly mentioned yet. I myself got this information recently from Joseph Wright (see his answer and our comments in Simple un-obfuscation of some LaTeX internals).

As Michael said \let\macroa\macrob "copies" the definition of \macrob to \macroa. However an IMHO important thing here is that the definition isn't actually copied, i.e. exists twice, but the command sequence \macroa now points to the same hash table entry as \macrob. This means that \let\macroa\macrob uses less memory space (very important in the early days but not anymore) and is faster then \def\macroa{\macrob} because in the second form two command sequence names have to be resolved in the hash table.

Also \let actually "copies" the definition of tokens, which do not need to be macros/command sequences. This allows the definition of command sequences representing implicit characters like \let\bgroup={.

Answer 3

They're pretty completely different. \let copies a command to a new name, while \def creates a new command.

For example:

\def \foo {bar}

creates a new command \foo, that evaluates to bar when run.

\let \foo \bar

copies the commands from the \bar commands to the \foo command, so you can call either. Because it's a copy (and not a pointer from one to the other), redefining \foo won't change the behavior of \baz. Hence:

\def \foo {bar}
\let \baz \foo
\baz % Outputs 'bar'
\def \foo {new-definition}
\baz % Still outputs 'bar'