Oops!

On 15/09/2010 21:15, Chris Rowley wrote:
> So what happens when e-TeX reads  \reserveinsert<bignum>  {<stuff>} ??
But of course he meant:
> So what happens when e-TeX reads  \insert<bignum>  {<stuff>} ??

But this is interesting too: 
>>
'Undefined control sequence'! The macro is called \reserveinserts :-) It 
just marks a set of count/dimen/skip/box spaces as not available for 
general use. So you can put any number in here without an error 
(provided it's less that \maxint, of course). It just doesn't work, in 
the sense you don't gain any extra \insert's.
>>
So is \reserveinsertssss a primitive of e-TeX?  Or a sort of 'plain e-TeX' macro?

Note that \insert does not in any sense reserve the other registers, but its existence may cause them to be taken over for page-building purposes at arbitrary times.

>>
I did a few tests. As the e-TeX manual says, you can't \insert beyond 
254. \insert255 gives the special 'You can't \insert255' error (as 
without e-TeX), and anything higher is a bad register code. (The 
{<stuff>} seems to vanish.)
>>

Ah, but is that vanish b: or vanich c: :-) ??  
I think we should be told!  I suspect b: (ie the tokens in <stuff> are never processed at all) but what a waste of tokens...!!  And the error message or something should point this out to B.L.Euser


chris
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