On 10/28/11 10:56, Hans Hagen wrote:
Just switch to philosopher mode for a while and ask yourself what implications that would have in the rather fuzzy world of printing.
What is a 'real' dimension? What we call points (pt) is in other application also called points but happens to be basepoints in our universe (bp). Also, imagine that in good american tradition the dimension would have been inches while we all moved on to meters ...
So, Knuth foresaw this (and also wanted predictable calculations and wanted to avoid unportable floating points) so he came up with his own unit: scaled points. So, a \dimen is just a \count but consider it tagged to show you pt for convenience when printed (\the) and the parser permits you to enter these numbers as pt/bp/dd/cc/cm/mm etc.
At the lua end all are just integers (with some limited size but that might change as Taco and I want to play a bit with adding a couple of bytes and see to what extent that will break things).
In metapost the internal unit is bp (because it targets at postscript) and there cm, mm etc are just variables that one multiplies with so there you can change the universe by just saying "in := cm".
Skips are another story (not to speak of boxes as we do have a dimendef but not a boxdef of inserts which are yet another class of animals).
Thanks for this philosophical explanation - I guess I'll have to reread these passages in the TeX book. I'm looking forward to your experiments :-) Thomas