[TUHS] [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index

[TUHS] [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index

[Doug McIlroy]

Ralph,

> > On unjustified text, fmt (which uses an algorithm purported to be like
> > Knuth-Plass)
>
> I wonder if that accounts for modern, coreutils 8.28-1, fmt's weirdness
> that I've seen for a while but never got around to investigating?
>
>     $ yes x | fmt | awk '{print length, $0}' | uniq -c | sed 5q

You threw it something of a curve ball--an infinite paragraph.
At some point I suppose it chokes, and tries its best to make
a semiparagraph of equal-length lines. (Since the real paragraph
is not yet complete, it would be wrong to make the last line of
the semiparagraph short.)

Equilibrating apparently led to the split between 69- and 71-letter lines.
Whether the alternation of 11 of one and 16 of the other is an infinite
pattern or a subpattern is not clear. It could be part of a continued-fraction
approximation, related to the staircse appearance of a bitmap "straight line".

Doug

[TUHS] [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index

[George Michaelson]

In email. We used to talk about how many nested >>> it made sense to
need in a conversation. fmt was usually cited as the arbiter, because
you had to give it args to get outside of its limits, which meant you
were staring down the barrel of 6-8 >>>>>>>> deep nests for a naieve
user.

I think, it even came up as a beer conversation of the rule-of-seven.

on FreeBSD, its around 64/65 by default. Also MacOSX. Thats a 10+ deep
nested conversation of he-said-she-said-they-said-we-all-said

mind you, we also argued about top posting. which I am doing. So there.

-G

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 10:45 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> Ralph,
>
>> > On unjustified text, fmt (which uses an algorithm purported to be like
>> > Knuth-Plass)
>>
>> I wonder if that accounts for modern, coreutils 8.28-1, fmt's weirdness
>> that I've seen for a while but never got around to investigating?
>>
>>     $ yes x | fmt | awk '{print length, $0}' | uniq -c | sed 5q
>
> You threw it something of a curve ball--an infinite paragraph.
> At some point I suppose it chokes, and tries its best to make
> a semiparagraph of equal-length lines. (Since the real paragraph
> is not yet complete, it would be wrong to make the last line of
> the semiparagraph short.)
>
> Equilibrating apparently led to the split between 69- and 71-letter lines.
> Whether the alternation of 11 of one and 16 of the other is an infinite
> pattern or a subpattern is not clear. It could be part of a continued-fraction
> approximation, related to the staircse appearance of a bitmap "straight line".
>
> Doug