RE: [Groff] funny behaviour of \{

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > Try the following and look at stderr:
> > 
> >   .ab\{This causes a funny error message!
> > 
> > Is this just pathological behaviour or does it make any sense?
> 
> [...] I'm not seeing anything that looks pathological:

You probably haven't looked closely enough.

If you, for example, do the following

  .ab\{foo
  Test

with

  groff -Tps -ww ... > xxx.ps

you will see `foo' sent to stderr, and `xxx.ps' is empty!  With other
words, there is no error message at all, but groff silently aborts
after the .ab request.

This *is* pathological IMHO.  The correct error message should be

  `\{' not allowed in a name

and then groff should abort (if aborting at all).

`\}', BTW, shows the same strange behaviour.


    Werner