At 2023-10-26T16:58:13+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 09:51:40AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > At 2023-10-26T16:12:36+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > > > Regarding PP, LP, and P, what's the history of them? Why do we > > > have the 3? I'm willing to reduce them to just one. > > > > I invite Doug McIlroy to go on record, but my surmise is that they > > were introduced as crutches for people already familiar with ms(7). > > > > Doug's original man(7) (1979) didn't have `P`. But Unix System III > > added it in 1980, and 4.3BSD followed suit in 1986. This > > information is in groff_man(7). > > Was the original PP? It had both `PP` and `LP`. I reckon Doug figured ms(7) veterans would have an unreformable habit of typing one or the other. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/man/man7/man.7 I'd have been sterner--and probably less fondly remembered by my peers. (While I'm armchair quarterbacking Doug's plays of 45 years ago, oh, how I wish he hadn't have used input traps for anything in man(7).[1]) > Still, compatibility with ms(7) would make it slightly easier to > trasnfer learning from man(7) to ms(7), would one learn it. I know > many other macros are incompatible in bad ways, but the less the > better, no? That's true, but these days the knowledge transfer is, I submit, vastly more likely to go the other way; that is, people will be exposed to man(7) as their first roff macro language, and might decide to pick up ms(7). At that point, they'd have to learn that `LP` and `PP` do _different_ things. I think it's actually better if they _don't_ have to unlearn the "fact" (applicable only to man(7)) that they are exactly the same. Better, I believe, to promote only `P` in man(7). Anyone wanting to pick up mm(7) will still enjoy some knowledge transfer. Without arguments, `P` in mm(7) "does what you mean". (I will not elaborate here on what that means; see the groff_mm(7) man page in groff 1.23.0 and please God not an earlier version.) Regards, Branden [1] In practice, nearly no one took them up for any purpose except the one place you _had_ to use them: `TP`.
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