On Sun Feb 16, 2025 at 3:17 AM CET, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2025-02-16T02:44:12+0100, onf wrote:
> > Seems like you found yourself in a familiar situation:
> > "This under-documented code seems stupid. Was the person who wrote it
> > really that stupid, or am I missing something?"
>
> Predictably, I would not be as hard on myself as you are on me.
>
> I didn't think the original code was "stupid", merely mistaken in
> special character selection with respect to getting the desired quotes,
> [...]
Seems like you are assuming bad faith where there is none. I was not
trying to characterize your train of thought. I was just light-heartedly
paraphrasing what I tend to think in similar situations when I am not
sure if something is deliberate or a mistake on the author's part.
> > Experience has taught me to approach seemingly non-sensical code with
> > caution.
>
> Contrastingly, experience has taught me to test examples before sticking
> them into a man page, and to test the ones that are already there by
> copy-and-pasting them, before assuming they're correct. This recourse
> might have been thought unnecessary by the drafters of the GNU pic(1)
> page[.]
I don't think that's in contradiction with what I wrote.
I get that you're trying to say you had reason to believe the authors
made a mistake and didn't notice it because they haven't checked how
it renders, though.
> [The GNU pic(1) page unfortunately is one of our "diff" pages (like eqn(1))
> that documents only GNU extensions to AT&T pic (relative to Eighth
> Edition Unix pic, I think), and presumes that the reader is already a
> sophisticated pic user.
Yeah; I usually turn to "Making Pictures With GNU PIC" by Eric S. Raymond
instead. Then there is also eqn(1):
Primitives
eqn supports without alteration the AT&T eqn primitives above, back,
bar, bold, define, down, fat, font, from, fwd, gfont, gsize, italic,
left, lineup, mark, matrix, ndefine, over, right, roman, size, sqrt,
sub, sup, tdefine, to, under, and up.
New primitives
[details of new primitives]
(Great! Mind telling me what those AT&T ones do??)[1]
~ onf
[1] I usually turn to mandoc's eqn(7) instead.
