[tex-live] serious `slovak' Babel bug

[Werner LEMBERG]

Folks,


is it useful today to report Babel bugs to the LaTeX bug database?  Does
anybody take care of answering them or even fixing issues?

Here's a quite serious bug:

  \documentclass{article}

  \usepackage[slovak,USenglish]{babel}

  \begin{document}

  ^^78

  \end{document}

  ===>

    ! Missing $ inserted.
    <inserted text>
                    $
    l.7 ^
         ^78
    ?

It might be acceptable that the ^^xx notation fails within a Slovakian
language environment since the circumflex has been made a shorthand,
but this is not the case here.

Note that the `esperanto' and `kurmanji' language modules fail
similarly.  Especially in the light of the recent discussion of using
the ^^xx notation instead of `real' 8bit character codes it's quite
important IMHO to fix this problem.

[A CJK user reported this issue to me.  For the CJK package, which
 heavily relies on ^^xx working correctly, a workaround is to insert

   \catcode`\^ 7\relax

 right before starting a CJK environment.]


    Werner