On 2/5/2021 5:49 PM, Jairo A. del Rio wrote:
I agree with the optional alternative. If LuaMetaTeX goes (c)leaner, it can get rid of obsolete constructions made for a pre-Unicode world. Some are already angry with primitives gone and I think that's positive, but it's only my opinion. I never got saw angry mails here about gone primitives. Context commands seldom go away; in the transition to mkiv some encoding stuff became obsolete and after many years might have been removed from mkiv because no use needed/used them anyway. New stuff gets added, old stuff stays or gets improved.
Primitives are an engine thing and there are differences between engines, for sure. When context overloads primitives (happens in a few cases) the original often is available as \normal<primitive>. There is a core set of primives (original tex, luametatex has dropped some backend related ones and nilled some prefixes that we never used in context anyway), some etex enhancements brought new primitives (some make no sense in the luametex universe but one can always fake something), some auxiliary pdftex primitives never were available in lua(meta)tex because we have lua, and from omega/aleph we ended up with nearly nothing (luametatex dropped some useless direction stuff). So: no real harm done. And then of course luametatex brought some new primitives. When overloadmode is enabled one cannot redefine primitives and/or macros, depending on what property they have gotten (i'm now down to four pages todo). Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------