[XeTeX] Version numbers [was: On cross-language font selection]

[James Crippen]

On 3/6/07, Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> wrote:
> On 6 Mar 2007, at 10:55 pm, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
> > it seems that with TeX, MetaFont and XeTeX  « la
> > boucle est bouclée » (a French saying, more-or-less the loop is
> > looped):
> >
> > - TeX and its version numbers asymptotic to \pi
> >
> > - MetaFont and its version numbers asymptotic to e
> >
> > - XeTeX and its version numbers asymptotic to 1
>
> Thank you, Bruno; that's funny! I hadn't thought of it like that -- I
> really was intending to jump to 1.0 at some (not-too-distant) time,
> but now that you've pointed this out, I may be tempted to stay with
> the 0.99.... series indefinitely!
>
> Note that pre-release versions of TeX itself approached 1.0 in a
> similar way, though. In particular, it reached version 0.999999 on
> September 5, 1983; see, for example, <http://tex.loria.fr/historique/
> tex82.bug>.
>
> So XeTeX is only following in the footsteps of its famous ancestor.

How about approaching the square root of two (i.e. sqrt(2) =
1.41421356...) ? That way you can actually get past version 1.0 at
some point.

James