Doug McIlroy <d...@cs.dartmouth.edu>:
> > troff pre-dates C by quite a while
>
> Actually not. C and nroff were contemporary--both debuted in 2nd edition
> Unix.
> troff came in the 3rd edition. Of course nroff was preceded by roff, and
> that by runoff; but neither of those had a | operator, which was the
> triggering question. Certainly by the time | for absolute page coordinates
> appeared in nroff/troff, C was well known to all involved.
>
> roff, the original of which I wrote, did not have expressions, though
> it did support constructions like .ps +2 to increment and decrement
> parameters.
Possibly the person you were quoting was thinking of runoff, which does
predate C. I have the MAD sources around here somewhere.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
