I'm working on a LaTeX package which might need to do some things differently depending on the class that's being used. I'm wondering if there's a way to auto-detect or test the document class.

One could certainly look up the class files and test for the existence of a specific macro defined by that class, but is there a smarter way? I looked at the definition of the \ProvidesClass macro and can't see if it saves the class name anywhere except \@currname. I believe \@currname is just the name of the current package or class being read.

Basically I want to execute

\author{\longauthorname}

in the article class but

\author[\shortauthorname]{\longauthorname}

in the beamer class.