[luatex] Lua is removing hyperbolic functions

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Fri Jul 18 03:25:15 CEST 2014


On 2014-07-09 at 08:20:36 +0200, Dirk Laurie wrote:

 > Lua is now in 5.3-work3. It contains three things of possible
 > importance for LuaTeX:
 > 
 > 1. Basic UTF-8 (not Unicode) support.
 > 2. Integer and bitwise arithmetic operators on 64-bit numbers.
 > 3. cosh, sinh, tanh have been deprecated: not in the manual
 >    but still available through a compatibility option that is
 >    activated by default.
 > 
 > If any LuaTeX user can give good reasons why the hyperbolic
 > functions should stay, now is the time to air them on the
 > Lua mailing list (http://lua.org).

Hi Dirk,
a good reason is that in the TeX world we can't afford that things
change frequently.  No problem when things are added but it's annoying
if things are removed.

I'm not good in mathematics but I suppose that the hyperbolic
functions could be implemented quite efficiently in Lua as long as the
exponentional function (written in C) is available.

But I'm wondering why one wants to remove the hyperbolic functions at
all.  Don't they work properly?  If the sole purpose is to make the
math library as small as possible, I think that it's better to disable
the code instead of removing it.  What I have in mind is something
like "#ifdef HYPERBOLIC" or similar.  The code can be re-activated
easily then.  Or are the hyperbolic functions too hard to maintain?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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