At 2025-02-24T03:36:28+0100, onf wrote: > On Mon Feb 24, 2025 at 2:36 AM CET, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > [...] > > My lodestar on this point is that we can use C and the shell to create > > files named with trailing spaces, so there's no reason *roff, as a bona > > fide programming language, shouldn't be capable as well--as long as it's > > not difficult to implement. > > > > Further, because such file names _are_ so easy to create in C and the > > shell, I think if there were dangerously underhanded threats in the > > offing, we'd have seen them by now. It's not like people need to > > smuggle such things onto the file system under the cover of a *roff > > document. (In GNU troff, since "safer mode" is on by default, a > > document can't _create_ a file of _any_ name on its own initiative.) > > I think the point is that such filenames aren't being used,
No, that's not "the point". It's _your_ point, iterated ad nauseam, with justifications like "bringing to [my] attention" points I raised in Savannah tickets over a year ago. Your observation is shallower than it seems, because to date the use of such file names as request arguments to *roffs has been _impossible_, whereas it has not with C and the shell. Do I think such names are likely to become popular? Heck no. But your argument is fallacious because it depends on whatever the opposite of survivorship bias is. "We find that legume crops are disfavored in lunar agriculture." Well, yeah, because no one's growing crops of _any_ sort on the Moon. > so breaking compatibility (and making adding comments to these > requests annoying) Your annoyance is a subjective thing. I find inconsistent programming language grammar _more_ annoying. Under the status quo, one could get used to slapping down comments without paying any attention to whether they had spaces (and, historically, tabs) before them; applying that same practice to `ds` and `as` requests then brings the punishment of unexpected results. Possibly this is one reason *roff authors have so seldom employed comments adjacently to requests: they got burned and eschewed them. (I'd guess that the higher-order factors, though, are the same as in every other language. "It's obvious./If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read./You are not expected to understand this.") > for the sake of supporting them isn't worth it. My calculus differs. Regards, Branden
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