On 2009-03-05 18:49:15 +1030, Taco Hoekwater
<[email protected]> said:
For example, right at the start of luatex, we threw out a bunch of
primitives from Heiko Oberdiek and myself that provide various scripting
subroutines for use inside pdftex.
I'm curious, are these the primitives like \pdfescape...,
\pdfmdfivesum, \pdf...deviate, \pdffilemoddate, and so on? (Sorry, I'm
not up to date on all of the new primitives of LuaTeX.)
If there was a functional proposal for namespaces, I would gladly
implement that and put the new primitives in a dedicated namespace.
Did the namespace idea of the ExTeX team never work in practice? I
really liked that idea, what little I read of it...
But any language extension to allow for namespaces would likely be
just as incompatible, so I highly doubt that would solve your issue.
I'm not suggesting this seriously, but you could prefix new primitives
with chars that are usually "other" to dramatically lower the chances
of a clash. E.g., \^scantextokens, \^directlua, and whatever.
Actual known clashes are a different issue, and we do try quite hard
to avoid such names: for example, luatex will never get \begin as a
new primitive.
Are you aware, Karl, of any namespace collisions that have already
occured? I do understand your concern, but I imagine that only a very
small number of old documents will be affected by the LuaTeX primitives.
Will
