The original TEXsource has been written in the Pascal language without enhancements like those contained in e.g. Turbo Pascal. Owing to this, ports to other systems and languages could be done without major changes. The disadvantage: the size of all the arrays is given static at the point of compilation.
This implementation allows to set the size of most of the arrays that TEX internally uses to be set only at the time of starting the program. What sizes can be set and what meaning these arrays have will be dealt with in a following section.
For values not contained in the configuration file default values are used, when setting repeatedly, the last value is taken.
With the |-d| option you can display the values.