Re: [Groff] antiquity of troff

[Eric Raymond]

Doug McIlroy <address@hidden>:
> > troff pre-dates C by quite a while
> 
> Actually not.  C and nroff were contemporary--both debuted in 2nd edition 
> Unix.
> troff came in the 3rd edition.  Of course nroff was preceded by roff, and
> that by runoff; but neither of those had a | operator, which was the
> triggering question.  Certainly by the time | for absolute page coordinates
> appeared in nroff/troff, C was well known to all involved.
> 
> roff, the original of which I wrote, did not have expressions, though
> it did support constructions like .ps +2 to increment and decrement
> parameters.

Possibly the person you were quoting was thinking of runoff, which does
predate C.  I have the MAD sources around here somewhere.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>