Message-Id: <199402071659.AA16388@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Mon, 7 Feb 1994 15:59:21 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@sheffield.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: virtual dimensions
Status: R

From:          Alan Jeffrey <alanje@cogs.sussex.ac.uk>

%>
%>>How about "virtual dimen"s, that only get defined when the user needs them,
%>>for instance, when assigning to them?
%>
%>Problem is that this only works if the first use of the dimen is an
%>assignment.  If it is to read from the dimen, you get a `Missing
%>number, treated as zero' error.  It may be possible to code round
%>this, but I wouldn't like to bet on it :-)
%>

True, but I can't think of any situation when one would want to use a
dimension register before assigning to it anyway. I was rather hoping that
the first use of any register would have to be an assignment, but put me
right if I am wrong. The idea was that if you never assigned to it, it never
got used, and so one of a limited number of registers was saved.

However, I can imagine the performance of your system suffering somewhat

Mike
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%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
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