> [...] at the expense of obvious clarity to anyone writing > content today [...]
If you want clarity, choose the modern syntax: \s[40]. (By the way, groff also allows \s'40'.) The old syntax will always be inconsistent or ambiguous, unless you are willing to give up on the \s0 shortcut for returning to the previous size. E.g., what should \s0000010 mean? Should this behave differently from \s10? Why or why not? Should we allow leading zeros in numbers? They are perfectly okay in the rest of groff. (Note that the C syntax of using a leading zero to denote an octal number is similarly misleading and should have been abolished long ago.)
