[OS X TeX] Problems customizing report.cls

[Morten Høgholm]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 18:26:52 +0200, Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at mac.com> wrote:

> Le 15 avr. 05, à 17:37, Daryl Basil Biberdorf a écrit :
>
>> 1. What does \p@ do? I'm just not seeing what this does,
>> and it's not discussed in the LaTeX Companion. Web searches
>> are useless thus far.
>
> Regarding that question alone: \p@ = 1pt, \z@ = 0pt, \@M = 10000, \m at ne  
> = -1, and so forth. These are tricks used inside the definition of the  
> LaTeX format, and dating back to plain TeX, to make the execution of  
> commands faster. I never really understood why this actually makes  
> things faster. For the speed of modern computers it doesn't seem so  
> significant any more anyway.

Yes, it's not really necessary these days. You save much more debugging  
time by making your code readable than you'd save on runtime!

The only place where I really try to optimize is when doing loop functions  
as they should always use tail recursion (which for some reason isn't  
implemented for \@for and \@tfor in LaTeX).
-- 
Morten
--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>