Re: [Groff] It is time to modernise "groff"

[Roger Leigh]

On 31/08/17 21:54, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote:
> Introduction:
>
> A) There are about 1400 lines in the code in the "groff" repository that
> contains the backquote, grave (`) as a directional quote, but it is output
> exactly as itself, as it is not processed as an input to "groff" to be
> formatted and typeset.
>
> Example:
>
> an-old.tmac:.    tm `R' is a string (producing the registered sign), not a 
> macro.

As a general point, if ` and ' are used as single quotes in C++ sources, 
you can actually use ‘ and ’ and tell the compiler that the input is 
UTF-8.  It's been the default for GCC for over a decade; even the 
recent-ish Microsoft compilers support it.

The C++11 language standard also introduces a u8"" string literal type. 
It's a UTF-8 string literal.  There are also u and U literals for UTF-16 
and UTF-32, respectively, if you want to have characters and strings in 
various explicit wide representations without the ambiguity of L 
wchar_t.  If it's not already, having groff be unicode-clean from end to 
end would be greatly desirable, and these aid portable use of unicode 
characters directly in the program input.

While groff predates standard C++, and restricts itself to C for the 
most part, it has a lot of esoteric stuff relating to memory management 
which could for the most part be replaced by standard containers and 
smartpointers.  It would be a bit slower to compile, but make the source 
base much more accessible; I found it difficult 15 years ago.


Regards,
Roger