Re: `\c`, mdoc(7), and man(7) extension macros (was: [PATCH 1/2] man*/: srcfix)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Alex,

At 2023-10-26T16:12:36+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Yup.  I have similar feelings about C++, BTW.  I have a hard time
> understanding complex languages.  I prefer simpler languages.  Most
> features can be implemented as library code, without complicating the
> language.

Just know that following this road will take you to Lisp.  Or Scheme.

Or Forth.  ;-)

(Personally, I wish regular C _had_ put memcpy and memset (or bzero :P )
in the language.)

> Yep, I have 2/2 locally.  Maybe reply to the mail CCing vger, keeping
> only the commit message, so that readers of the list can get a notice
> of what MR.sed is.

Okay.  I'll aim for that for v5.

> I always make the mistake of writing MS instead of MT, out of inertia
> of having an 'S' for the start!  :D

Yes, that's what Doug McIlroy thought might happen.

> The others have nicer mnemonics that work for me; I wouldn't change
> them.  And well, just for changing MT, I wouldn't do it.
> 
> >     SY -> NS (syNopsis start)
> >     YS -> NE (syNopsis end)
> 
> Hmmm, no; I don't like it.

Fair enough.  I venture these things on the off chance that they're
brilliant strokes that will greatly increase the appeal of learning
man(7).

> Regarding PP, LP, and P, what's the history of them?  Why do we have
> the 3?  I'm willing to reduce them to just one.

We covered this in another thread, but as Ingo noted, there is no hope
of actually _retiring_ any of these.  At most they can be documentarily
deprecated and a high "-rCHECKSTYLE" setting can gripe about them.

groff man(7) formats every Seventh Edition Unix (1979) man page
correctly as far as I can tell, and I don't want to ever give that up.

(This is a slightly different objective from preserving perfect
compatibility with 7th edition's tmac.an.  I have no qualms about
discarding compatibility with details of macro package behavior that no
one relied upon for practical purposes.)

Regards,
Branden

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