[XeTeX] Version numbers [was: On cross-language font selection]

[Jonathan Kew]

On 6 Mar 2007, at 10:55 pm, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> it seems that with TeX, MetaFont and XeTeX  « la
> boucle est bouclée » (a French saying, more-or-less the loop is  
> looped):
>
> - TeX and its version numbers asymptotic to \pi
>
> - MetaFont and its version numbers asymptotic to e
>
> - XeTeX and its version numbers asymptotic to 1

Thank you, Bruno; that's funny! I hadn't thought of it like that -- I  
really was intending to jump to 1.0 at some (not-too-distant) time,  
but now that you've pointed this out, I may be tempted to stay with  
the 0.99.... series indefinitely!

Note that pre-release versions of TeX itself approached 1.0 in a  
similar way, though. In particular, it reached version 0.999999 on  
September 5, 1983; see, for example, <http://tex.loria.fr/historique/ 
tex82.bug>.

So XeTeX is only following in the footsteps of its famous ancestor.

JK