[tex-live] No room for a new \write

[Hartmut Henkel]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2007, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> How about simply making \newwrite and \newread primitive operations?
> They are nothing more than a \chardef and a bit of bookkeeping anyway.
> Then the executable can skip whatever number it feels is magical, and
> a normal user will never know the difference.

maybe also something new like "\openout append 5" would help (which
should be downward compatible), allowing to append stuff to an existing
file without purging its former contents. Then one could close and open
a file several times within the same run, which might reduce the need
for a larger number of \write files (it would also allow e. g. more
easily to record info from many TeX runs in some kind of log file).

Regards, Hartmut