[luatex] Hash tokens meaning

[Robin Fairbairns]

Sensei <senseiwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5/27/13 3:31 PM, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> > did you ever learn to swim?  did they teach you by throwing you in the
> > deep end of the pool, and telling you to read the instructions on the
> > bottom?
> 
> No, but they did ask me to enter the pool. I learned by trial and error.
> 
> > i ask, because that's what you seem to be doing here.  if you want to
> > get a feel for tex, read "tex for the impatient
> > (mirror.ctan.org:/info/impatient/book.pdf -- also available in french)
> 
> > if (as it seems) you want to learn latex, don't start with the latex
> > kernel (which is poorly commented in many places), start from the users'
> > point of view, with something like "short introduction to latex"
> > (mirror.ctan.org:/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf -- also available in
> > several other languages)
> 
> No. I am a happy LaTeX user, I just wanted to see TeX.

so your question -- about hash tokens -- was misleading?  or do i miss
something?  have you avoided writing macros up until now?

> I honestly didn't realize that I asked something "deep" or
> "sensitive", I thought there just was some kind a cheatsheet somewhere
> that I didn't find by myself. I was wrong.

no cheatsheet, but it's not so much "deep" as "tortuous".  (though there
are depths in there, but none that

> > most people take some time to progress from user-level stuff to reading
> > the kernel's code.  (fwiw, my head often swims when reading latex
> > internals, and i've been reading it(them) on and off since the 1980s,
> > before the current latex 2e was released.)
> 
> Well, I'll find myself some time to read it, then :)

there are documented sources in http://www.ctan.org/pkg/latex-tds (that
is, the package that catalogue entry describes).  they're much better
(in parts) than reading the sources that get compiled ... there are some
parts that are no more use in those compiled packages than the code
itself (the comments being as good as useless -- one of the *really*
tricky areas of latex, the output routine, is characterised by comments
like "lots of changes here", with no hint as to what was changed or why).

robin