[Groff] Is this a bug?

[Clarke Echols]

I ran into an interesting "behavior" this morning...


Here is the offending text:

.H3 "\f2.\^.\^.including 21 examples"

Macro H3 is defined as:

.  de H3
.  ce 1
.  ft HB
.  ce 1
\\$1
.  ft 1
..

I get an error because groff is interpreting the first dot
in .\^.\^. as the first character in the argument to H3, apparently
ignoring \f2.  If I put a \& sequence in front of the first dot,
it's happy and everything works.

Is this what I should expect?

Clarke