Re: [Dev-luatex] A design philosophy question...

Taco Hoekwater writes:

David Kastrup wrote:

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Taco Hoekwater writes:

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David Kastrup wrote:

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Anyway, is something like that an area that LuaTeX would actually ever consider touching? Perhaps one day, but definately not soon. There are a few ways out of this, but they all require dimens to occupy more than 32 bits internally, a step not to be taken lightly.

Not at all. For fixing rounding of the units, the following patch should do it:

Yes, but not now. As Hans said, it is vital in this stage to compare against (pdf)tex and aleph.

I understand.

Also, this only fixes the rounding vs. truncation, not the deviations created by the fact that TeX talks in base10 but calculates in base2.

Certainly. But at least TeX's talk is round-trippable: the 5-digit values output by \the will convert back to the same value on input. This kind of quality is absent from units different from "pt" and "sp": "1in" is perhaps the ugliest example. While TeX only does one-way conversions with units, I consider the difference in implementation quality disturbing, given the author. -- David Kastrup