Hi Matthew, from a user's point of view, your question finds an answer in the language reference of groff.
$ man 7 groff Search for "Identifiers". The last paragraph of this section says: Identifiers for requests, macros, strings, and diversions share one name space; special characters and character classes another. No other object types do. The best thing you can do is design pseudo name spaces, e.g. by prefixing your identifiers. Maybe a groff wizard can disclose the existence secret local scopes, but I am not sure. Best regards, Oliver. On 15/10/2024 20:13, Matthew Polk wrote:
I'm currently getting impression that everything is global in groff, except maybe when talking about environment, then it's bound to that environment. But is anything assuming the environment doesn't change is local? I ask because reading the heirloom-doctools manual, which is a very conservative implementation (Minus a couple of groff extensions implemented) of troff, states that the requests '.lds' and '.lnr' create a register such as a number or string bound to only the macro it was created in and erased when the macro has finished releasing the memory. But searching through the groff manual, I do not right now see anything like .lds or .lnr, so is there no intention behind such a thing? That environments is the only thing bounding a register even if introduced in a macro? Maybe I'm thinking too much like a programming language such as C or Python where yes, there are very much such thing as a local variable. Is this why common groff naming convention has to name it a certain way to pretend its local? I wasn't sure and wanted to know more about this. It would either through naming or actual local requests make things a bit easier.
-- Dr. Oliver Corff mailto:oliver.co...@email.de
