Hi folks, Doug originally sent this to me privately, but I'm forwarding it to the list with his permission.
I concur with his economically articulated general principle. ----- Forwarded message from Douglas McIlroy <[email protected]> ----- Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2026 21:33:29 -0500 From: Douglas McIlroy <[email protected]> To: "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Message-ID: <cakh6pivtb1sgoze7g66uusw2c7-7b3t1mfk6fzfvxm7nwv+...@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: string comparison bug in pic > Our pic(1) man page documents "print" as a GNU extension print expr was in the original pic, but expressions were numeric and did not include relational operators, Gnu added many operators and allowed multiple expressions. I agree with your guess that the grammar was not adjusted sufficiently. One insufficient adjustment is that more than one argument is allowed but not less.. On general principles, if there's an obvious limiting behavior as n goes to zero, it should be allowed, regardless of what one thinks of its utility. In the case of print, the behavior should be to print an empty line. Doug ----- End forwarded message ----- Regards, Branden
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