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Message-ID:  <17252.1266338458@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date:         Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:40:58 +0000
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From: Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: LaTeX3 8-bit only?
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
In-Reply-To:  Your message of Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:36:30 +0000. 
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Status: R

Joseph Wright <joseph.wright@MORNINGSTAR2.CO.UK> wrote:

> On 16/02/2010 14:57, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> > My humble opinion is that LaTeX3 should define a character as being whatever the
> > underlying engine thinks is a character. That is, a "character" should be a
> > "character token" (with the catcode ignored or, equivalently, normalised):
> > - for pdfTeX, an 8-bit number
> > - for XeTeX, a 16-bit number
> > - for LuaTeX, a number in the range 0 -- 0x10ffff
> >
> > This way, the format does not need to hack extensively (as LaTeX2e does) around
> > the engine's limitations, and can let the engine do his job, and concentrate on
> > his own job as a macro package. (Sort of Unix philosophy: do one thing, do it well.)
> >
> > I mean, LaTeX2e *had to* hack around the encoding limitations of pdfTeX because
> > there was no alternative, but now there are.
> 
> This was the point I was trying (and clearly failing) to get at:
> modern engines can deal with things so the formats don't need to.

i read manuel as saying that latex 3 need _only_ deal with the "natural"
data type of the engine, so that the fantasies involved in reading utf-8
in latex 2e need not be duplicated for latex 3.

nice idea, imho.

r