From: Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org, g.branden.robinson@gmail.com
Subject: [TUHS] Rivers, the ragged right, and BCPL roff (was: Spooky action at a distance in line adjustment...sometimes)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2018 22:23:57 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201807010223.w612Nv7P094105@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> (raw)
> I was poking around on the Unix v7 man page archive the other day, and
> discovered to my delight that BCPL roff's request list was documented
> there.
Yes, it's the same spec, though reimplementated; there was no BCPL
compiler for the PDP-11.
> Unfortunately, it was marked up in...BCPL roff embedded within
> a man page, which hopelessly confused groff.
I edited the v7 manual and I believe I proofread every man page. How
could I have overlooked the misbehavior of the .li request*, which was
even then not in the reference manual's list of n/troff requests? On
closer examination, .li does appear in a condensed alphabetical list of
requests--and it appears in the source. But if Joe never described it,
it's no surprise that groff dropped it. It is totally unnecessary--a
bit of special pleading rendered obsolete by Joe's elegant invention
of \&.
doug
* .li causes the next line to be read literally, even if it begins
with a dot.
next reply other threads:[~2018-07-01 7:19 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-07-01 2:23 Doug McIlroy [this message]
2018-07-01 23:20 ` Warren Toomey
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=201807010223.w612Nv7P094105@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU \
--to=doug@cs.dartmouth.edu \
--cc=g.branden.robinson@gmail.com \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).