[tex-hyphen] hyphenation different in xelatex?

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> I always believed that my diploma thesis got lost, we used floppies at
> that time.  But I unexpectedly found my LaTeX files recently on a CD.
> They compiled like a charm after more than a quarter century.  I was
> quite surprised that it worked perfectly with LaTeX-2e, which even
> didn't exist at that time.  There was no need to modify any file.

  Did you have the original output to compare with?  Does it match
glyph-by-glyph?  I'm always interested in concrete examples of TeX's
stability.

  On a point of detail, I note that as you were presumably using LaTeX 2.09
in your thesis, you still were when you recompiled it 25 years later --
the initial \documentstyle would trigger LaTeX's 2.09 mode.  I haven't
used it in a long time, though :-)

> Mojca, of course it's more work to maintain the old and new patterns
> at the same time.  But can't the old patterns be simply declared as
> being frozen forever?

  In effect, they already are.  The question is what to do with them.

	Arthur