[luatex] Hyphenation in plain TeX

Taco Hoekwater taco at elvenkind.com
Fri Oct 8 16:17:34 CEST 2010


On 10/08/2010 04:04 PM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
>> Given that the author of this file (Peter B.) has a much deeper understanding of
>> the innards of TeX that I'll probably ever have, I assume there is some
>> mechanism in e-TeX's \dump that prevents him from using space on undefined
>> macros. But maybe I misinterpreted his intentions here.
>>
>> Maybe Taco can enlighten us on this particular point?
>
>    I'm curious too.  The experiments I ran in order to answer a question
> (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/323/what-macros-are-defined-in-a-web2c-format-file)
> on tex.stackexchange led me to believe that all control sequences that
> were defined at some point left some remnants in the format file, but I
> may be wrong, of course.

All csnames that have ever been defined are part of the string pool
and are thus dumped in the format, but that is not true for the actual
token lists that are their definition: these are actually thrown away
if at top-level the definition is cleared.

Best wishes,
Taco


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