It's also worth remembering that at that time not everyone was guaranteed to have access to e-tex so it wasn't a good idea to write a macro package that depended on it. I believe it's only fairly recently that e-tex has become standard for LaTeX?
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robin Fairbairns Sent: 09 July 2007 13:23 To: Werner Icking Music Archive Subject: Re: [TeX-Music] MusiXTeX hates LaTeX: true or myth? Jean-Pierre Coulon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, 9 Jul 2007, Robin Fairbairns wrote: > > > [...] > > no: registers are things like boxes, counters, lengths and the like. in > > knuth's original code, there were a maximum of 256 of each; in e-tex > > 65535 are available. it was always easy to run out of registers in > > original tex -- pictex was a good candidate for that; it wasn't just > > musixtex. > > Since I find PICTEX.TEX from 06/11/1989 in my EMTEX distribution, I believe > that in this distribution from 1997, the same as Daniel's, the register > limit had already been expanded, but Daniel was not aware of this! nope. pictex has been around since forever. however, it uses large amounts of registers, and with latex or context it was always prone to running out (there are several "solutions" to this problem, both under latex and under context -- making pictex use scratch registers instead of allocating its own, etc). without those packages, you were always in danger of finding you couldn't fit anything _else_ in with pictex; even with them there was always a chance of problems. e-tex dates from before the time of your pictex distribution, but i don't believe eberhard ever provided an e-tex version in his system, so etex.sty wouldn't have helped. robin _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.daimi.au.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.daimi.au.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
