At 2020-03-30T19:16:56-0400, Doug McIlroy wrote: > Does anyone else see the following behavior? > Version 1.22.4 handles \s correctly up to \s39, but > truncates a size of 40 or greater to its first > digit. Here are two screen shots, with ^D edited in > to show where input ends and output begins.
Hi Doug! This appears to be for backward compatibility. The 1992 revision of CSTR #54 says in §2.3: "Note that through an accident of history, a construction like \s39 is parsed as size 39, and thus converted to size 36 (given the sizes above), while \s40 is parsed as size 4 followed by 0. The syntax \s(nn and \s±(nn permits specification of sizes that would otherwise be ambiguous." As Robert Thorsby noted, this is documented in the groff Texinfo manual; however, it is not noted in the groff(7) man page, something I'm inclined to fix in the near term. To the broader group, I would furthermore suggest that, being GNU roff, it might behoove us to preserve the above "accident of history" only in compatibility mode, and have the \sn form accept only a single-digit argument for consistency with other escape forms. Doug still would have gotten into trouble, but it would have been a more easily understood trouble. What do folks think? Regards, Branden
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