[XeTeX] Random number primitives

[David Carlisle]

On 13 November 2016 at 15:46, Apostolos Syropoulos
<asyropoulos at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Let me say that I find this point of view far too conservative. OK METAFONT
> lives in the previous century but luatex and xetex are products of this
> century so they must utilize what is better. Also, the point of introducing
> XeTeX was the need to handle things TeX had no provision.

That's true except that as pdftex and luatex have this already and have had
for years, in this particular instance it's playing catchup that is
being suggested.
Not promoting novel functionality.

>  Finally, it would
> an excellent opportunity for XeTeX to do something better that the others....

Not really. If the main use cases are met by the existing code then engine
differences are just extra work for the maintainers of the macro format
to hide to provide a consistent interface to the end user.

>
> Regards,
>
> Apostolos
>

David