[texhax] Hyphenation questions

[Karl Berry]

    what constitutes a duplicate?

Whatever TeX complains about :)?

    Are the patterns "mm1" and "mm3" duplicates?  "mm" and "mm1"? 
    "mm2" and "mm4"?

I don't know, but you could try giving those as \patterns to initex to
find out.

    I ask because there's some tests for duplicate \patterns in
    "trip.tex" that I don't quite understand.  

Essentially nothing after the first few lines of trip.tex is
understandable, to my mortal eyes :).  Anyway, the only one of the above
combinations I see in trip.tex is bb and bb1, which sounds like a random
edge case anyway -- like most things in trip.
    
    It seems to me that for any given sequence of characters, whatever
    hyphenation "counts" (or whatever we call the digits in a pattern)
    there are shouldn't affect whether the pattern is a duplicate or not.

That sounds logical, but ... trying to follow the code in tex.web,
I cannot easily conclude whether that is the case or not.

Happy sleuthing,
Karl