Good stuff here from James and Larry.
At 2024-02-17T17:47:32-0500, James K. Lowden wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Feb 2024 10:49:52 -0600
> "G. Branden Robinson" wrote:
>
> > That's before lex. That's even before yacc. That's before the first
> > editions of major texts in parser theory now taught to comp
> > the roff language does not have a formal grammar
>
> Not true, unless by "formal" you mean "expressed as BNF". The parser
> reads input and produces output. Input not conforming to its syntax is
> rejected. That couldn't be true without a grammar to compare it to.
Gonna have to go with
On Fri, 16 Feb 2024 10:49:52 -0600
"G. Branden Robinson" wrote:
> That's before lex. That's even before yacc. That's before the first
> editions of major texts in parser theory now taught to computer
> science undergraduates were even written.
Yes, but that overstates the case. We're talking
On Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:37:10 -0500
Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> Translation involves parsing input into an AST according to one
> grammar and unparsing to generate output according to another.
> Chomsky's work uses transformational grammars primarily for
> generation. I'm not aware of any implementa
[dropped Mark and Alexandra from CC, looping in groff@gnu]
Hi Alex,
At 2024-02-18T16:18:38+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Nah, I like 5n. I could use [-rBP=7n] in the build system for
> preventing errors like this one for the time 1.24.0 is not a thing, to
> catch those formatting issues with
To expand on Branden's observation that translating from one member of the
roff family to another is hard, I note that the final output of roff
usually presents a text in a shape that has been fine-tuned for appearance.
In grammatic terms it might best be described in transformational terms a
la Ch
