On 13 November 2016 at 16:47, Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropou...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> >> That's true except that as pdftex and luatex have this already and have had >> for years, in this particular instance it's playing catchup that is >> being suggested. >> Not promoting novel functionality. >> > > So just because the design in pdftex and luatex was conservative, if not > flawed, > it doesn't mean we should follow their "lead".
that is the model in much of xetex as far as features not relating to unicode and font support are concerned: that something that works in (pdf)tex and xetex should work the same way in the two systems. > The point here is to produce > pseudo-random numbers. How they will be produced is something that the end > user > should not worry about. It depends. currently, if you set the seed you get the same numbers from luatex and pdftex. if xetex uses a different RNG then you would get different numbers in xetex. that complicates some things not least testing cross platform compatibility. > In addition, it would be a nice opportunity for pdftex > and luatex to "upgrade". Perhaps. But that wasn't the current request. > > >> >> Not really. If the main use cases are met by the existing code then engine >> differences are just extra work for the maintainers of the macro format >> to hide to provide a consistent interface to the end user. >> > > This is a fallacy! Just becauce LaTeX can process UTF-8 encoded input files, > it doesn't mean XeTeX is useless! That isn't what I said. > And there is no extra code. Oh there would be _less_ code probably as you'd use a system call rather than implement the function inline, that isn't the issue. > It would be just > a simple system call. So instead of implementing random with a call to > > > long random(void) > > > one should implement it with a call to > > > long lrand48(void) > > A.S. David -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex