Re: [groff] A macro package for lists in TROFF

[Stephanie Björk]

P.S. Actually, after re-reading your mail a bit, I think I know what you
meant by your question.  Sorry for being confused.  Anyway, I think that
Groff's ability to have numerical registers of more than 2 characters long
is "weird and fancy" relative to classical TROFF.  I started learning TROFF
from classical TROFF, so that kind of gives me a habit.

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 2:07 AM, Stephanie Björk <address@hidden>
wrote:

> > I don't see anything weird or fancy that hasn't been a part of groff
> > for at least fifteen years.  To what are you referring?  I'm
> > intrigued.
>
> Perhaps my word choices weren't so good.  "Weird, fancy" is kind of
> subjective, actually.
> I still do think that my macros are using "weird, fancy" stuff, not least
> because it takes advantage of Troff's ability to seemingly rewrite itself?
>
> About the stack implementation, I just had this weird idea of escaping the
> macro definition within the macro definition with backslashes and see if it
> works and stuff.  However, Troff's ability to take values of a numerical
> register and use it as a name to another register (.nr my_\na_\nb)
> intrigues me very much.
> I'm not exactly sure how I found this ability, but I think I found it by
> accident.  Then I decided to extend my accident and make a reverse polish
> notation calculator in Troff, which seems to work for some reason.  (
> https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Parsing/RPN_calculator_algorithm#N.2Ft.2Froff
> )
>
> Nonetheless, I find it rather interesting that Troff can use parts of
> itself to rewrite itself.  I've never seen other programming languages able
> to do this, but I do think there are a few like this that I've not heard of
> yet.
>
> On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 6:04 AM, Peter Schaffter <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 05, 2017, Stephanie Björk wrote:
>> > as my macros really use weird, fancy stuff.
>>
>> I don't see anything weird or fancy that hasn't been a part of groff
>> for at least fifteen years.  To what are you referring?  I'm
>> intrigued.
>>
>> --
>> Peter Schaffter
>> http://www.schaffter.ca
>>
>>
>