Follow-up Comment #25, bug #68256 (group groff):

Let me add that the conditional emboldening feature _might have worked_ in
Ossanna _troff_.

But, because the `bd` request is meaningless and ignored in "nroff mode", to
test the claim we have to do one of the following:

1.  Write an interpreter for the C/A/T binary data stream emitted by Ossanna
_troff_.  (Seeing if the stream is "different" would be suggestive but not
dispositive.  We need insight into what the typesetter is actually being told
to do.)

2.  Use a Seventh Edition Unix-era debugger to perform an analysis of the
execution trace as Deri did in comment #22.  I don't think a symbolic debugger
for Unix yet **existed** in 1979.
As far as I can see, _sdb_ was originally written for the VAX port of Unix.
V7 has _adb_, which not a symbolic debugger, closer to what we'd now call a
"monitor", or the kinds of debuggers we had on 8-bit micros (T-BUG, ZBUG,
MIKBUG, and so on).

3.  Set up some kind of remote debugging GDB server thing so the "debugging"
can be driven from another host...with the target system being a version of
Unix that didn't yet have a network stack of any kind, let alone a TCP/IP.
TCP/IP didn't exist yet.

Each of those seems close to hopeless to me.  The first is the most tractable,
but there are no implementations available for running in a hosted Seventh
Edition Unix environment.  More than once I've lamented the absence of a K&R C
"cat2ditroff" translator.


    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68256>

_______________________________________________
Message sent via Savannah
https://savannah.gnu.org/

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to