[luatex] tex.enableprimitives producing non-primitives?

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:30:40PM +0300, Élie Roux wrote:

> [discussion about the use of \pdfprimitive]

Perhaps it becomes clearer, if I quote the pdfTeX manual:

| \pdfprimitive control sequence
|
| This command executes the primitive meaning of the following control
| sequence, if it has been redefined or made undefined. If the following
| control sequence is undefined and never was a primitive, nothing happens
| and no error is raised. If the control sequence was initially expandable,
| \pdfprimitive expands either. Otherwise \pdfprimitive doesn't expand. The
| primitive has been introduced in pdfTEX 1.40.0.

BTW, as you have seen, the second sentence is wrong:

\catcode`\{=1
\catcode`\}=2
\ifx\directlua\undefined
\else
  \directlua{tex.enableprimitives('',{'pdfprimitive'})}
\fi
\pdfprimitive\FooBar
\end

pdftex -ini:

  This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009) (INITEX)
  ...
  ! Missing primitive name.
  <to be read again> 
                     \FooBar 
  l.7 \pdfprimitive\FooBar

luatex -ini:

  This is LuaTeX, Version beta-0.40.6-2009090421 (TeX Live 2009) (INITEX)
  ...
  ! Missing primitive name.
  <to be read again> 
                     \FooBar 
  l.7 \pdfprimitive\FooBar

I think, the error message is a good thing, thus the manual should be fixed.
(Therefore I have added ntg-pdftex). Also the manual could meantion, that
\pdfprimitive was fixed in 1.40.4.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>