Message-Id: <199402022028.AA27192@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Wed, 2 Feb 1994 20:08:04 +0000
From: Paul Taylor <pt@DOC.IC.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: On the death of \footheight
Status: R

David Carlisle:
> That does not mean that all the other thousands of LaTeX users should
> have one of the very limited dimen registers wasted by being allocated
> but never used.

\dimendef\footheight=0 would solve most of these problems.

You can assign to it without trouble (unless you're stupid enough to think
that \dimen0 retains its value after your code surrenders control),
and since it is nowhere guaranteed to have a meaningful value, can read it.

It you want an error message,
\def\footheight{\begingroup\afterassignment\no@footheight\dimen0=}
\def\no@footheight{\@latexerr{footheight is obsolete}\endgroup}
would even preserve \dimen0, though you couldn't read \footheight.

Whilst LaTeX2e is compatability mode looks more or less compatible,
this sort of thing is going to mean that it will be a LONG TIME
before people (can) switch to native mode.

Paul