On 2/27/2015 5:53 PM, Jaroslav Hajtmar wrote:
Hello ConTeXist. Petr Olsak (maintainer of Czech/Slovak support for TeX) helped me with simple typing of sign charts. He made a PlainTeX macro who is working too in ConTeXt (see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/230273/typing-of-math-sign-charts).
Petr Olsak (not ConTeXt even LaTeX user) was modified PlainTeX macro to work in ConTeXt and asked the question: "Does anybody know why ConTeXt sets catcode of & to 12? This means that it is incompatible with plain TeX".
Which is imo no big deal. I did not write that he would give redoing some work, after discovering
Dne 27.2.2015 v 19:04 Hans Hagen napsal(a): that catcode & is different than in plainTEX.
May I therefore ask , what is the reason that has character & catcode other than in Knuth PlainTeX? There are catcodes of other characters incompatible?
Because the context table mechanisms don't use & (and never used it) so ther ei sno reason to make & special. The _ and ^ are also normal characters. For now we keep the $ for math (and in math mode the & ^ _ work as expected).
Although we're to some extend plain compatible it's not our aim, just like we're not amstex, latex, lamstex or anytex compatible.
Ok. Thanks for the explanation. I wrote to Peter that developer context to have a reason, and certainly it would from an ordinary whim not done. Even so, I am very satisfied with the degree of compatibility. Practically all of my old PlainTeX macros in ConTeXt work fine. Thanx Jaroslav
Hans
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