On Fri, Jul 28, 2023 at 07:55:54PM +0200, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> Am Fri, 28 Jul 2023 19:25:54 +0200 schrieb LARONDE Thierry:
> 
> >> Note that in order to do file testing by expansion (which we want for
> >> various expl3 functions), we *have* to avoid \openin and that realistically
> >> means \(pdf)filesize is the best option.
> > 
> > Why in this case not having requested a \filefind primitive,
> 
> Adding new primitives to all engines LaTeX supports is not easily
> done, it can take a year or more and even if they are finally
> implemented we would have to provide fallbacks for older engines.
> So why should we do this work if a suitable primitive is already
> present in all engines engines we test? 
> 
> Imho the question is more the other way round: why did you
> implemented the primitive differently to the other engines? As you
> explicitly document "but no extension is implicit" you must have
> been aware that one must consider this case and that you are
> deviating here.

No: I didn't know what others were doing. I refused to read others
code. All I wanted was a description of the API (and this was mainly
lacking).

I simply thought about the feature: when wanting the size, it can
be for whatever file.  Adding automatically an extension was
preventing from obtaining the size of a file without an extension and
this was not giving the size of the file as specified (being partly
specified, not absolute was not a problem; changing the filename was).
This was stupid to not be able to obtain the size of a filename
without extension or to alter the filename. So I didn't implement
it this way but, contrary to the others, I tried to described
precisely what the implementation was doing so that somebody reading
the description would have an accurate description of the behavior.

I have explained the corner cases of the date primitives to. This does
not come either from others implementation or description. But this
comes from _my_ implementation.
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C