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From: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: [OzTeX] ^^M^^M not the same as \par.
Summary: OzTeX is doing it correctly
Message-ID: <1991Mar29.173107.16269@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 29 Mar 91 17:31:07 GMT
References: <1991Mar28.071310.26773@basho.uucp>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Reply-To: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
Organization: U.C. Berkeley
Lines: 10
In-Reply-To: john@basho.uucp (John Lacey)

In article <1991Mar28.071310.26773@basho.uucp>, john@basho (John Lacey) writes:
>If I say `\def\foo#1\par{...}' ... [and] `\foo text^^M^^M'...
>I get five tokens---the  obvious four and a trailing blank space.

Read the TeXbook, page 46f very carefully.  Especially the double-dangerous
bend on page 47 that begins `If TeX sees an end-of-line character'.

The first ^^M TeX sees is in state M, so it gets converted to a space.
It is the second one that TeX sees in state N and which is converted
into a \par.