Re: mdocml: .Bl -column phrases ignore spacing rules for trailing

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Kristaps,

> By following groff's logic, you'd have to say "if you have a tab
> directly after the last token in a list column, the punctuation will
> be considered normal text", which is not clear to a dummy like me
> anyway.

Or:
Literal tabs are considered normal word characters, even when
delimiting column phrases.
But that is about as confusing and surprising.

> I suggest that we go with mandoc's old behaviour at the expense of
> this one issue.  It's easier to make unilateral statements:
> punctuation at the end of a list column, whether separated by Ta,
> tabs, tabs and spaces, etc., is treated as delimiting punctuation.

Right, after pondering this for some time, i tend to agree that
traditional roff behaviour of treating tab, space-tab and Ta
differently is so surprising that it should indeed be called a bug
and not a feature.

Now, as you said, this does not affect column lists only,
but literal tabs outside column lists as well.
But in literal context, there is no issue because spacing
is kept verbatim in any case, and outside literal context,
tabs are discouraged anyway.  So, basically, the tab vs space-tab
surprise only affects column lists in practice.

Given that the traditional behaviour of column lists has been
so quirky in so many ways, i regard it as sane to make it a bit
easier to understand at the expense of minor issues with backward
compatibility.  This is a case where i feel that idea applies.

So, i propose the following patch instead.
It works with all formatters.

Yours,
  Ingo


Index: operator.7
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/src/share/man/man7/operator.7,v
retrieving revision 1.7
diff -u -p -r1.7 operator.7
--- operator.7	31 May 2007 19:19:58 -0000	1.7
+++ operator.7	21 Aug 2010 16:04:55 -0000
@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
 .Bl -column "= += -= *= /= %= <<= >>= &= ^= |="
 .It Operator	Associativity
 .It --------	-------------
-.It \&() [] -> .	left to right
+.It \&() [] -> \&.	left to right
 .It "! ~ ++ -- - (type) * & sizeof"	right to left
 .It \&* / %	left to right
 .It \&+ -	left to right
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