Hi Doug,
> The convention of dropping irrelevant attributes may have been
> justified during the experimental days of pic's development, but seems
> cheesy now, nearly 40 years on.
I agree a "strict" parsing, considering all attributes relevant, that
disallows `box radius 3' would ease writing pi
The number of (g)pic users in the world must be pretty small
by this point, though I am among them, thanks to gpic et al.
Oddly the sequence
d = 3
r = 2d
does draw an error message from gpic.
On Wed, 26 Apr 2017, Doug McIlroy wrote:
This pic fragment
d = 3
circle
> WOW. After 40 years they're not errors, merely idiosyncrasies.
> I admire your courage.
Merely senority. The eruption was triggered by my ineptness at
figuring out how an old pic script that literally contained 2d
could ever have worked. The idiosyncrasies are not part of my
mental working set
On 27/04/17 07:36:56, Doug McIlroy wrote:
I suggest that irrelevant attributes and constructions like 2d should
be errors. Any previously working code that such a tightening of
syntax might reject will be easy to fix.
What do folks think about this issue? Depending on response, I may
try t
This pic fragment
d = 3
circle radius 2d
draws a circle of radius 2, not 6 as one might suppose. It is parsed as
circle radius 2 d
and the "irrelevant attribute" d is ignored.
In another context
d = 3
move 2d
the parsing results in a move of 2 then of d. Thu
