From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>
Message-ID: <2vidnbnNi9JlfhmiU-KYgw@comcast.com>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] sam command language
Date: Thu,  9 Oct 2003 08:42:38 +0000
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6981dfce-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

rob pike, esq. wrote:
> Back to troff: in qed, \ was linear.  You added a
> backslash to quote something.  In a macro, you
> added two backslashes.  In a macro calling a
> macro you added three, etc.   Instead of 2^N,
> you needed N.

I also forgot about the terminal driver, which in some
incarnations defaulted to \ as an escape character,
necessitating typing \\ to enter each one of those \s.
As I recall, Software Tools used @ for all its escape
characters.  Experience seems to suggest that using
the same character as escape at multiple nested levels
of processing is not a good idea ("sucks" is the
technical term).
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--
Dennis Davis, BUCS, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
D.H.Davis@bath.ac.uk