Re: [Groff] Lack of professionalism ....

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I made a copy of s.tmac with 10 spaces after each initial dot.  Then
> I ran groff on a 25,000-line source file which includes 8,000
> request lines, essentially all -ms macros. User times with and
> without extra space were indistinguishable to three significant
> digits: any difference was swamped out by timing noise.

Well, the ms macros are *much* simpler than mdoc's highly nested macro
parsing.  You should really try unprocessed vs. processed mdoc,
applied to a very long man page, and you will see a significant
difference in processing time.

Note that only the mdoc and me macro files get compressed.

> So it looks to me as if the policy of distributing mildly compressed
> macro packages has only two perceptible effects: it complicates
> maintenance and it complicates understanding.  I am thus led to
> believe that this is yet another instance of ungainly galloping gnus
> departing from Unix's original path of simplicity and transparency.

Well, this space compression in the groff distribution was there from
the very beginning, 25 years ago – introduced by James Clark, not me.


    Werner