tds 0.100

[Paul Vojta]

On Thu Oct 19 10:16:17 1995, David Carlisle <carlisle@cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>
...
>
> Ah in that case I think latex/file.tex would be a very bad syntax for
> this as the current semantics for it on any TeX that accepts / as a
> directory separator *is* that the input path contains a
> directory called latex directly containing a file called file.tex.

Is that _useful_ semantics?

> I'm not sure what a good syntax would be, or even the intended meaning.
> Is \input latex//*//file.tex (say) supposed to restrict the search
> just to the top level texmf/tex/latex subtree or does it  search the
> whole tree, including texmf/tex/plain/* looking for a directory latex,
> and then looking below that for a file called file.tex?

The semantics would have to be specified explicitly.  I prefer the former.
I don't think the latter would be useful.

> Personally I'd rather the whole notion be dropped, I am sure that some
> version of this idea would be useful, but it just seems too late in
> the day after months of discussions to be adding new ideas to the
> draft.

I brought this up in June...  months ago.

> If it goes in I think it should not suggest any possible syntax and be
> suitably vague about sematics, something like  ... if it were possible
> to restrict the search path to a subtree via the use of suitable TeX
> macros .....

That would be fine with me.

--Paul Vojta, vojta@math.berkeley.edu