[luatex] macros to invoke lua in LaTeX

Will Robertson wspr81 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 5 11:51:28 CET 2009


On 2009-03-05 18:49:15 +1030, Taco Hoekwater 
<taco at elvenkind.com> said:

> For example, right at the start of luatex, we threw out a bunch of
> primitives from Heiko Oberdiek and myself that provide various scripting
> subroutines for use inside pdftex.

I'm curious, are these the primitives like \pdfescape..., 
\pdfmdfivesum, \pdf...deviate, \pdffilemoddate, and so on? (Sorry, I'm 
not up to date on all of the new primitives of LuaTeX.)

> If there was a functional proposal for namespaces, I would gladly
> implement that and put the new primitives in a dedicated namespace.

Did the namespace idea of the ExTeX team never work in practice? I 
really liked that idea, what little I read of it...

> But any language extension to allow for namespaces would likely be
> just as incompatible, so I highly doubt that would solve your issue.

I'm not suggesting this seriously, but you could prefix new primitives 
with chars that are usually "other"  to dramatically lower the chances 
of a clash. E.g.,  \^scantextokens, \^directlua, and whatever.

> Actual known clashes are a different issue, and we do try quite hard
> to avoid such names: for example, luatex will never get \begin as a
> new primitive.

Are you aware, Karl, of any namespace collisions that have already 
occured? I do understand your concern, but I imagine that only a very 
small number of old documents will be affected by the LuaTeX primitives.

Will




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