[texhax] \write17?

[David Carlisle]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018 at 22:43, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
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>
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> David Carlisle wrote:
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> yes although I don't think there is or was any particular convention to use 16.
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> DEK makes specific reference to it in The TeXbook :
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> An `|\immediate\write16|' differs from ^|\message| ....

sure but that's just an example not specifying a convention that
people should do that more generally,
For example latex (for no good reason that I can see) uses an
allocated but unused stream \@unused (which is 0)
for \typeout.

David