[Groff] -ms and TOC (as well as beautiful bullet lists)

[Janez Žemva]

Hi everyone,

i know you are all going to start shaking your head, because I want to start 
this old topic again. I am certain we all implemented our own glorious TOC 
(Table Of Contents) mechanism at some point in our lives.

The question for Werner now: ... Why is it, that -ms macros _have_ to remain 
crippled (i.e. no TOC mechanism, no beautifully indented -mm bullet lists, etc 
... just because some old forgotten Unices could pride themselves with the same 
crippled -ms functionality? Of course, in time, I would be able to write my own 
macros implementing this, but why not include examples of this countlessly 
reimplemented functionality into the main distribution (-msextra, for example)? 
I thought strict backward compatibility was a M$ thing, not a GNU thing... and 
if GNU is not Unix, is it then better than Unix?