[tex-k] Small bug in METAFONT: The Program (descriptive text) + inconsistency between TeX and METAFONT (non-functional)

[Patrick Varilly]

Hi,

In my printing of METAFONT: The Program (eighth printing, Nov 2017),
section 214 ("Token lists") describes the five ways to encode tokens
internally.  The first one says: "A symbolic token whose hash code is p is
represented by the number p, in the info field of a single-word node in
mem".  I believe this should say "whose hash ADDRESS is p", i.e. the
location p such that text(p) is the string representation of the symbolic
token.

Two tokens can of course have the same hash code (as defined in section
208, "Compute the hash code h").  For instance "ba" and "ac" both have hash
code 2*"b"+"a" = 2*"a"+"c" = 293, but they would be represented by
different locations in the hash & eqtb arrays: clearly, METAFONT does not
get confused by the definition "def tricky = ba+ac enddef".  Later
sections, such as section 229, indeed use the term "hash address" instead
of "hash code" for this reason.


Separately, I had to carefully study the definitions of print_scaled in TeX
(section 103) and METAFONT (section 103: what a coincidence!) to understand
their differences.  The intended functional difference is that METAFONT
tries to print integer scaled values such as 42 as "42", whereas TeX
happily prints them as "42.0".  However, there is a second difference,
where the statement that "rounds the last digit" is "s := s + '100000 -
(delta div 2)" in METAFONT, but is "s := s + '100000 - 50000" in TeX.  Both
are equivalent, of course, since this statement is only invoked when "delta
> unity"; in successive iterations, delta is 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and
100,000, and it is when delta is 100,000 that it finally exceeds unity =
2^16 = 65536.  But I found it confusing why the two programs express this
operation differently.  If the constant '100000 were changed to
"half_unity" in METAFONT, then the procedure text would be both more
readable and completely general for any values of half_unity and unity that
are successive powers of 2, as long as the type of "scaled" was
sufficiently wide.  Conversely, if (delta div 2) were replaced by 50000 in
METAFONT, the code might run a little faster (loop unrolling seems unlikely
to detect that (delta div 2) is only ever calculated when it is equal to
50000).  But why the inconsistency between TeX and METAFONT?  I realize
this is more of a stylistic issue than a "bug", but Knuth pays such
meticulous attention to detail that this inconsistency seems accidental.


In both cases, I checked the latest errata at
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde-errata.pdf and did not
find anything relating to the issues above (especially the first one).

Thank you in advance for giving these reports your careful consideration.

All the best,

Patrick Varilly
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-k/attachments/20240206/aeb570fd/attachment.htm>