Re: input 39 in ansinew.def

[Chris Rowley <C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk>]

Berthold wrote --

> 
> Good rules.  And easy to live by if you are on a system that uses ASCII

Yes, character encodings incompatible with 7-bit printable ascii are
impossible for us at present.  This is due to the fundamentals of the
way Don Knuth set-up TeX and which we do not have the time (or skill?)
to change right now.

But this need not affect Rule 2:

>-- And all characters keep the same catcode throughout the body of a
>document.

> or OT1 input

Oh no!! SCREAM!!!  OT1 is not (and never has been AFAIK) an input encoding.

> rather than ANSI, ISO Latin 1 or

I had only recently realised that ANSI is not ASCII-compatible (add
usual grumble about things emerging from A:-).

I still think that the IS0-LATINs are but I am probably wrong.

> Unicode.

If this is not ascii-compatible then "We" need to revise both LaTeX
and Plain TeX or even Plain eTeX pdq!

But maybe not on this list, we need a tex-chars list:-)?

>  And once you get rid of all the unneccesary use of octal 
> notation it actually doesn't interfere too badly with most style files.

Now this is something we have gone to some trouble to remove, in the
sense that we do not use it ourselves and no one else needs to use it.

But we do use a lot of `\... stuff so we would need to carefully check
our code to ensure that no such usages are loaded after making the
format. 


chris