Message-Id: <199402081223.AA13656@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Tue, 8 Feb 1994 11:51:12 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

Phil Taylor writes:
%>But when you go on to suggest that registers themselves are unnecessary
%>for values sucgh as \headheight, I think I would disagree; users will
%>need to access these in a transparent manner, whilst the \new... registers
%>are unused except by programmers (qua programmers).
%>

Actually, LaTeX provides a \newcounter{abc} command which I think uses
internal counter \c@abc. It can only be accessed by users with
\setcounter{abc}{2), \addtocounter{abc}{5}, etc. In fact, you say
\setcounter{page}{20} rather than \page=20 or \count\page=20 or whatever.
Thus this usage could presumably be done entirely using macros. Also same
with "length" instead of "counter", except that you say
\newlength{\abc}
rather than
\newlength{abc}

Another problem is that not enough facilities are provided in LaTeX to
manipulate these registers. There is an \addtocounter, but not a
\multiplycounter or \dividecounter, for instance. I bought The TeXbook
shortly after Lamport's book when I discovered this limitation!

Even worse is the fact that some numbers, like \arraystretch *have* to be set
as commands, rather than assigned to. You thus get three different ways that
numbers/lengths can be manipulated: (at least?)

-- As registers  \textheight
-- As implicit registers using \newcounter etc  page
-- As macros.  \arraystretch

Very confusing for the user.

Mike Piff


The main problem with

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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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