Follow-up Comment #7, bug #68133 (group groff): [comment #6 comment #6:] > Have you seen bug #68132? > > That's an example of a translation that "historically worked"--except in > groff for the last 37 years.
Yes, that would be another category.
> Semantic clarity, consistency, and corresponding reductions in the
> number of corner cases that have to be documented, tested, and
> maintained...while we trade most of the latter advantages away
> again for things we support only in compatibility mode, such
> features are at least firewalled off.
You know the code and test suite better than I do, of course. But on the
surface, "we have to maintain/test additional corner cases A, B, and C" sounds
like less work than "we have to maintain/test that corner cases A, B, and C
have result D under condition E and result F under condition G."
> Not just under the hood. Our Texinfo manual is at pains to
> distinguish characters from glyphs
Perhaps my terminology was sloppy. Characters are input and glyphs are
output, which is not what I was trying to get at. My intended point was it's
easier for a user to conceptualize "I can translate a character to another
character represented by an escape sequence" than "I can translate a character
to some but not to other characters represented by an escape sequence."
> Why do you suppose that a user of a typesetting system is likely to be
> able to achieve a high level of skill in that system without a clear
> idea of what its definition of a "character" is?
I expect Dennis Ritchie was a pretty skilled troffer and still used a syntax
you're advocating to disallow.
> If I get this stuff hammered out the way I envision, that use case will
> be served as follows.
...
> Why is the foregoing insufficient, especially for something that has
> never worked before?
(for groff values of "never")
The foregoing is sufficient, but seems a little extra hoop-jumpy than
necessary. Granted, jumping through hoops is a price of admission to many
aspects of roff, but maybe that price can be reduced sometimes.
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