Martin Schröder wrote:
Hi, at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe I met with Heiko and Hartmut and we talked about pdfTeX. One point discussed was namespace: Till lately most new primitives of pdfTeX startet with \pdf (\efcode, \lpcode and \rpcode are the only exceptions), but now we have some patches that add primitives that don't start with \pdf (\leftmarginkern, \rightmarginkern, \elapsedtime, \resettime, \random). I'm reluctant to use the non-\pdf-namespace and think it better to stay in \pdf.
Comments?
this is why i wrote a while ago that we need a different prefix, something \etxelapsedtime on the other hand thereis hardly any chance for a clash, e.g. if a macro package defines \elapsedtime it will still work ok; of course when one in such a macro package wants access to the original primitive, one can save its meaning; this is what i normally do. \let\normalelapsedtime\elapsedtime \def\elapsedtime{.... \normalelapsedtime ...} what we actually need is some access to the original meaning, like \primitive\elapsedtime; i dunno how hard it is to implement \def\elapsedtime{.... \primitive\elapsedtime ...} personally i think that we should move forward and not clobber extensions with funny prefixes as in \pdfleftmarginkern and such; as said, if a macro package wants to use that features, it has to be pdftex aware and as such can take measures to save the original meaning (so we could also argue for removing all \pdf prefixes) (when etex came available, it introduced primitives that clashed with low level context ones; it never was a real problem; one simply cannot extend tex and take all packages into account) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------