On 19 November 2015 at 13:21, jfbu <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi David and Hans, > > one question of a neophyte > > will (or is) code using \immediate\write16{foo} be broken > by more output streams ? > > (by this I mean could 16 end up being assigned to some > file output stream number) > > best > > Jean-François > >
Yes. In an earlier draft of this (that I referenced in the initial question in this thread) 16 was sort of reserved, but I think that's wrong, 16 isn't special in pdftex any non allocated stream writes to the terminal, I often used 20 for example (as going under 18 seemed wrong:-) luatex can't reserve all numbers bigger than 15 and extend the range, so something has to give... I think the current suggested model of allowing 0-127 to be used is fine. To be portable and use an unopened stream you can use any number bigger than 127 or use \@unused (which is 0 but you are not supposed to know that) which is the allocated-but-unopened stream used by \typeout. So existing documents using \write16 or \write20 etc may need a small change but they will likely need small changes anyway given the number of changes to the luatex primitives. David
