From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ggm@algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2017 11:17:06 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index In-Reply-To: <201712070045.vB70jHKP004480@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201712070045.vB70jHKP004480@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: 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 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