Ignoring pdftex primitives

[Sebastian Rahtz]

George White writes:
 > Well, plus 5 merit points for not assuming that Prof. Bloggs is a male, 
 > but minus 5 for the implication that a female academic might be silly!
even i refuse to accept the proposition that No Women Are  Ever Silly

 > It should be an objective of pdftex to ensure that there is a 
 > straightforward mechanism by which "reasonable" pdftex documents
 > can be processed using tex and produce a .dvi file that approximates
 > the .pdf within "reasonable" limits.  This goal is more important 
 > given the current somewhat fragile state of pdftex and related tools
 > than it might be in the long term.

I think it should always be borne in mind that pdftex is Thanh's
research project, and that *he* sets the objectives, not us. 

The stuff about whether file names can start with the word "depth" is
mildly interesting, I suppose, and pdfTeX's syntax should probably be
changed for that reason. But I for one am simply shocked that serious
TeX users would insert \pdfXXX commands directly in their source
files at all, as opposed to wrapping them in TeX-version-sensitive macros.

Sebastian