Re: [Groff] ".if '...'...' \# comments ..." Bug?

[Andrew J. Piziali]

Alejandro, you wrote:

    1. When you end a line with \ you have for all practical purposes
    added an unpaddable space at the end of the line, not escaped it.

    2. Quoting from groff(7):

    """
    The roff language is line-oriented.  There are only two kinds of
    lines, control lines and text lines.  The control lines start with
    a  control character,  by  default  a period "."  or a single quote
    "'"; all other lines are text lines.
    """

    and

    """
    Requests are written on a line of their own starting with a dot `.'
    or a "'", whereas Escape sequences are in-line functions and in-word
    formatting elements starting with a backslash `\'.
    """

    That is, all requests are of the forms: (a) "<eol>." for line
    breaking requests and (b) "<eol>'" for non-line breaking requests.

    3. ``\#'' eliminates the <eol> and therefore (a) makes your
    conditional invalid, and (b) of course it works as you show above.

    Therefore:

        .if '\*[FunctionalVerificationAspectsFigure]'' .  ds 
FunctionalVerificationAspectsFigure 999

    [on one long line] is not valid.

I still do not understand why an .if request of the form

    .if 'xxx'yyy' . ds String1 999

is invalid.  The groff info page explicitly says everything following
the .if expression is interpreted as though it was on its own line:

 - Request: .if expr anything

     Evaluate the expression EXPR, and executes ANYTHING (the remainder
     of the line) if EXPR evaluates to non-zero (true).  ANYTHING is
     interpreted as though it was on a line by itself (except that
     leading spaces are swallowed).


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