Hi, When you allocate a new register (with e.g. \newdimen) that is always a global definition (kind of a tex tradition). As a (likely to stay) experiment I added \newlocaldimen \foo \setnewlocaldimen \foo 123pt and comparable helpers. Some more can be found in lowlevel-scope.pdf in the distribution. The idea is that users who write their own macros that need 'variables' can define them locally without the danger for clashing with system ones (or each others macros). Actually, global assignments only affects that variable, so one can do \bgroup \newlocaldimen\foo \bgroup \global\foo=456pt \egroup ... use \foo \egroup Best use names like \mydimena etc in order nnot to clash with system ones (that can be protected against overload). In spite of redefinitions each time a macro using it gets expanded, performance is quite okay. It falls in the category "interesting hacks but maybe not needed because never asked for", but on the other hand, sometimes availability creates retrospective demand. (I also did \newlocalread and added some extra random access hackery to \read, so who knows what users will abuse that feature for.) 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------