Hi Erik, At 2025-04-11T23:46:08+0000, dvalin--- via GNU roff typesetting system discussion wrote: > The difference between theory and practice is much greater in practice > than it is in theory, and a complete switch to modern EREs would > doubtless be a major burden, so I'm not sure how helpful it is to > remind that moving away from obsolete¹ BREs would eliminate the above > problem, and additionally make all REs more readable by eliminating > the obfuscating backslash storm which afflicts BREs. E.g. all the > backslashes in the above example would vanish into the dustbin of > superfluity, leaving only the stuff which does stuff.
I'm aware of this argument, sympathize, and advocate it myself in areas where I think I can make headway. The reason BREs still exist is pretty much the same reason Sun stuck with its rotten old non-POSIX Bourne shell until its truly bitter end, selling itself off to Oracle: there are areas where breaking 50 year old ed(1) muscle memory or sed(1) scripts is regarded as a ghastly offense. groff happens to have some grognard users who are cut from that cloth, but more relevantly for this thread, there still exist systems out there running a troff descended from Unix System V/DWB 2.0, and I want to encourage their admins to replace it with GNU roff. > It's just a thought - less is more, I figure, and wading through a > cloud of characters which don't do anything just makes your job > harder. It does, but so does barrelling forward into modernity without thought for the platforms where I'd still like to see groff building and passing its test suite. We don't get any feedback from HP-UX or AIX users, ever, even though these systems are technically still alive. When Oracle finally pulls the plug on Solaris 10, it will be a joyous day for me, because it will enable us to throw off some legacy cruft. Regards, Branden
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