On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 12:04:13AM +0200, Pawel Jackowski wrote:
i've asked several everyday-TeX-users (but quite new to pdfTeX) what they think about prefixes. \pdf* prefix for commands not related to PDF are *more* confusing than non-prefixed that may occasionally conflict with macros.
Hans: \ext (extensions) -> \extmatch
IMHO much better than \pdfmatch. However, in 2010 nobody will remember that regex support was an extension in 2005. All prefixes encounter this problem. Thus, I agree with Taco, that if some command can't be grep-ed in representative TeX archives, it can be used as a new primitive.
And what about packages, macros that are not released?
Documents are allowed to contain macro definitions. Thus
existing documents can break because of added new primitives.
With prefixes and reserved namespaces, document and package
writers have the chance to avoid name clashes with future
versions of pdfTeX. Without is asking for unnecessary trouble.
Yours sincerely
Heiko