Re: [Groff] soelim and file names defined in string registers

[Joerg van den Hoff]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > just an idea: the problem would go away if the `.so' request could
> > be told (by a second argument to the request) to rerun all necessary
> > preprocessors on the sourced file before inserting it (the
> > preprocessors could be those specified in the groff call or
> > explicitely specified to the `.so' reguest). would this be a good
> > idea (apart from the someone_has_to_implement_it aspect)?
>
> I don't think that this is a good idea.  It is far too complicated to
> implement, and I can easily construct examples where a second
> expansion isn't enough, this is, you would need a third level of
> expansion.
>
> Why do you insist on passing the contents of a string register to
> `.so'?  It's rather easy to construct an input file `so-data' on the
> fly (using a Makefile, for example) which just contains a single line
>
>   .so <your file>
>
> and this file is then included with
>
>   .so so-data
>
> in the main data file.
>
>
>     Werner

thanks for responding:

well, I don't really insist (how could I..). Ted and you have explained 
work arounds (a third one might be to trigger a small 
sed|awk|perl|python|ruby script from within the Makefile to simply look 
for corresponding .ds AFILE, .so \*[AFILE] pairs and performing the 
necessary editing of the .so request).

the desire to use string registers has a simple cause:  I would like

1. to modify only some string registers at the top of a document to 
control the  "sourcing" without the need to look up the `.so' requests 
(essentially the same reason one prefers to define some constants at the 
top of a programm instead of hardcoding numbers all over the place).

2. to be able to source the same bit of troff input at several places 
within a document without having to globally `s/old/new/g'

no "hard" reasons, obviously (it just would be nice if the `.so' request 
_could_ interpolate the string register value) so I'll take one of the 
bypasses you told me.



joerg