Hi Branden, On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 10:28:13AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > 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". Yep; since PP is different in the languages, not using it here will be better. So, I'll soon s/PP/P/ Cheers, Alex > > (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`. -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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