Hi,
The tex engine has at most 65K dimen and count registers and these can
be local and global (although mixing these two models for the same
variable can be inefficient).
Anyway, in the current upload there is a mechanism for using way more
variables, global ones, that are managed by lua:
\luadimen test 100pt
\scratchdimen = .25 \luadimen test
\the\scratchdimen
\the\luadimen test
So, they act as normal dimensions and counters wrt assignment and
serialization and such. There are also floats and booleans (in addition
to integers and cardinals).
Then, as another experiment, there are one/two dimensional arrays of
variables. Think of:
\newarray name whatever type integer nx 100 ny 500
\arrayvalue whatever 20 30 1024
\the\arrayvalue whatever 10 30
\the\arrayvalue whatever 20 30
\the\arrayvalue whatever 30 30
Some more info can be found in the last chapoter of the evenmore.pdf
document. The question is: do we need this, and if so, do we need more
of that. It's a bit chicken-egg case: we can have lua and can pipe back
to tex, and we can stay at the tex end.
This is a lmtx only feature. Just for the record: these are macros, not
primitives, but they are rather efficient and have hardly any overhead.
The floats can be in 1.23 format, 1.23e45 format and also in 0x12p34
format, while integers can be in 123 format and 0x123 format; the hex
float format is lua's way of being roundtrip.
Hopefully there are no side effects.
Hans
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Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl
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