MiKTeX and proTeXt ⇒ TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [save_size = 50000]

[JethroBodeine]

You stopped reading? That's very rude and judgmental. I'm hardly the first person to push the envelope of TeX's applicability beyond that of typesetting. Indeed, Dr. Knuth invites such imagination, see the opening paragraph to his Appendix on Dirty Tricks. Besides that, my macros are not intended for production/industrial tasks; rather, simply to provide examples to generate or confirm ideas, to suggest theorems. I've accomplished the same things with C++ and MATLAB but I feel fortunate to have TeX to generate such examples without leaving the typesetting environment. I'm grateful for your help, in spite of some misguidance, and thankful that I don't need your approval to move on.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi JethroBodeine,

also from my side, welcome to the forum!

I read the post and followed the topic. Also I use LuaTeX in case of memory problems, which usually works well.

I can understand Johannes, that he gave up after some time, seeing that TeX is perhaps not the perfect tool for this case. But it's nice that he dealt with it already and made suggestions.

The issue sounds interesting, just seems to be quite difficult.

It's hard to speak about the problem, if we don't have code to run it. Perhaps post a minimal working example, which shows that problem.

Stefan

[Johannes_B]

Ok, to clarify, i didn't stop reading there. I asked freinds on another site for there input after posting, but the general consense was the same: Use a proper tool to get the job done.

But with your last post you changed the whole tone of the task by telling:
I want to do that, did it already using this and that but i am interested to find a solution based solely on TeX.
That is a completely different thing.

But, i am sorry to say, that i am not that experienced with the TeX-internals and might not be able to help.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

It's an interesting challenge to use TeX for it. In cases when TeX comes to a limit or, which is more often the case, when the produced code would hardly be readable, I switch to LuaTeX. Mostly for the clear classic programming code, which is easy to read and to work with. Examples are iterative and recursive calculations. I blogged some LuaTeX examples in German, not yet in English. Perhaps you understand the code. Sometimes the code can be reached by clicking the image.

Stefan

[JethroBodeine]

I'm not having a problem with recursion, never indicated one. I have plenty of examples of my own, a macro that recursively calculates n! (probably everybody's first example of recursion), recursive implementation of the bisection method and Newton's Method to approximate solutions to equations, a recursive macro that returns the hex representation of a number, a recursive macro that returns the iterates of the Fibonacci equation. I'd be happy to share these, they're in English.

My problems, the reason I came to this site, were with capacity errors. I resolved the save_size error by replacing a pair of \xdef by \edef, exactly as prescribed in the TeXbook. I then ran into a problem with memory and that's where LuaTeX helped. My capacity problems are resolved. I did not provide the code for the recursion for two reasons. First, I knew the coding was sound, it was already tested and ran just fine. Second, I could not possibly supply all the utility macros needed to support that code.

I was and am very careful with my words and I provided all the information that was necessary to make a clear statement of the problem. I stated clearly and concisely the goals of my code. I am not going to waste any more time trying to enlighten Johannes and his friends, they already know better.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Great that you fixed it! So to sum if if somebody lands here with a similar problem:

• save_size error fixed by replacing \xdef by \edef
• general memory problems resolved using LuaTeX

If there's another interesting problem later on, let us know. It's also good to have code to play with. No problem if it's long, the copy & paste is the same.

Best regards,

Stefan