On 22.02.26 11:00, Morten Bo Johansen wrote: > Therefore having the leading dot in the macro descriptions in all the manual
> pages would do away with the need for regular expressions. > > Now, of course this should not be done just to cater to me and my little > editor extension which I am probably the only person on the planet using, > anyway, but just for the sake of consistency. While it can be dangerous, I've been thinking as the inconsistent perspectives wash ashore here. Excessive consistency can sometimes reduce utility, in my experience. What if the invoking dot were used in executable examples and request definitions, and omitted in most other discussion? (Much of it prolix, best waded through only when absolutely necessary.) Then our various regexes could differentiate, depending on the immediately useful search criterion. The wish for lack of such discrimination provision seems spurious, as both literal and regex searches can easily be made indiscriminate. So should the manual pages be made conformant the other way round instead, for a more useful consistency? Erik P.S. Positive about Posix EREs here. Even BREs are "obsolete" causes of obfuscating backslash storms.
