Re: bug: quoted punctuation behaves strangely

[Lennart Jablonka <humm@ljabl.com>]

Quoth Jan Stary:
>On Mar 12 11:56:39, humm@ljabl.com wrote:
>> Consider:
>>
>> 	.Pq asdf .
>> 	.Pq asdf "."
>>
>> The expected output:
>>
>> 	(asdf).  (asdf).
>
>If I'm reading mdoc(7) right, this is what the
>Delimiters section has to say on that:
>
>        When a macro argument consists of one single input character
>        considered as a delimiter, the argument gets special handling.
>        This does not apply when delimiters appear in arguments
>        containing more than one character.
>
>Your "." (quotes included) contains more than one character,
>so it is not a delimiter.

In the troff language, a macro does not see the quotes surrounding 
an argument.  An argument can be quoted to contain spaces or 
quotes; that’s transparent to the macro.  So here, the argument 
does contain a single character and troff -mdoc treats it that 
way.  (Tested 4.4BSD-Lite2’s -mdoc, OpenBSD’s 
/usr/share/tmac/doc.tmac, and groff -mdoc.)

Further, even if that was not the case, the output would still be 
wrong:

	.Pq asdf \&.
	.Pq asdf "."

results in

	(asdf .) (asdf.)

>Also, why would you ever do this?

You wouldn’t.  And yet I did find it in the wild.
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