Message-Id: <199402071712.AA17030@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Mon, 7 Feb 1994 16:17:48 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: register usage
Status: R

From:          Philip TAYLOR <CHAA006@vax.rhbnc.ac.uk>

%>and this caused me to look further at the LaTeX-2e source.  I was surprised
%>to find that the original TeX/LaTeX register allocation code appears virtually
%>unchanged: that is, each of \new{count|dimen|skip|muskip|box|toks|read|write|
%>fam|language} is defined in terms of a unique global count register.  If
%>registers are in such short supply (and here I confess I am generalising
%>from David's specific argument, which referred solely to <dimen> registers),
%>then should LaTeX-2e be so profligate with their use for an activity which
%>even the most hardened hacker would surely agree is an occasional or even rare
%>event?  Would it not be better to use pseudo-registers for the register
%>allocation mechanism, rather than real count registers?
%>

I think I understand what you mean. You keep the fact that \dimen88 is the
next to be allocated in a macro defined to expand to 88. You then get
\newdimen to use this 88, which is assigned to \count5, say, incremented, and
then put back instead of 88 ready for next time. Is this right?

But I think that maybe many of the \newdimens etc aren't necessary anyway.
Their values could be stored in macros and used by macro
expansion? Even things like
\headheight=12pt
could be done using \afterassignment, although getting
\xxx=\headheight
to work too might be tricky, although all the counters that use \newcounter,
\setcounter, \addtocounter, would not have any problems. (grits teeth;-!


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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