On Tue, 4 Nov 2014 01:32:09 +0100 Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote:
> Hi Dale,
>
> Dale Snell wrote on Mon, Nov 03, 2014 at 02:21:09PM -0800:
> > On Mon, 03 Nov 2014 21:23:32 +0000 Keith Marshall wrote:
> >> On 03/11/14 20:16, Dale Snell wrote:
> >>> On Mon, 03 Nov 2014 16:36:04 +0000 Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>
> >>>> BTW, your mombog.mom had a blank line at the start and the
> >>>> comments were lines starting `\#' rather than `.\#'. One or the
> >>>> other might have an affect on your attempt at A3 in mom, I don't
> >>>> know.
>
> >>> "\#" is a _groff_ comment,
>
> >> Yes, but it's explicitly a GNU troff extension to standard troff
> >> grammar; it may not produce the desired effect, were you to process
> >> your input through any other troff implementation.
>
> > True. I know it's a GNU extension, but I wasn't considering the
> > use of \# in a non-GNU [nt]roff. I suspect it would result in an
> > error message. I certainly hope so, anyway.
>
> Hope again:
>
> $ cat testfile
> first line \# comment
> .br
> second line
>
> $ /usr/local/bin/groff -Tascii testfile
> first line .br second line
Okay, this I would expect.
> $ /usr/local/heirloom-doctools/bin/nroff testfile
> first line .br second line
> # also documented in the Heirloom Nroff/Troff User Manual
> # Heirloom added quite some GNU compat in the past, in general
Ah, okay. I didn't know that Heirloom had added some of the Groff
extensions. Good to know.
> $ /usr/local/plan9/bin/nroff testfile
> first line # comment
> second line
Oops. So, if I understand this right, plan9 nroff saw the \# and
escaped the #. But # has no meaning beyond its literal self, so "#
comment" was inserted in the first line. If I'd thought about it
earlier, I would have realized that something along those lines would
happen. Ah well, live and learn, I guess. :-)
> It's hard to add something as fundamental as comment syntax
> in an afterthought without breaking older tools.
True indeed. It's good that Groff retains the original comment
syntax. If it had simply _replaced_ the old with the new, that would
have gotten ugly.
> It *is* nice that such compat testing has become so easy with
> the ready made ports we have around (plan9 is already in the
> OpenBSD ports tree, and the upcoming Heirloom and GNU troff
> releases will be committed as soon as they are officially
> released next week or so, i already have them tested and
> installed locally :).
The 'roff community seems to be pretty friendly, and happy to help
each other. That's good to see. Not all the open-source communities
work so well together, alas.
--Dale
--
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin
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