Re: [Groff] pic syntax blemishes

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Doug,

> The convention of dropping irrelevant attributes may have been
> justified during the experimental days of pic's development, but seems
> cheesy now, nearly 40 years on.

I agree a "strict" parsing, considering all attributes relevant, that
disallows `box radius 3' would ease writing pictures with less puzzling
over how something's been parsed.

> The fact that 2d gets tokenized differently from 2nd is also
> disconcerting.

Dropping irrelevancies doesn't help `move 2d' being `move 2 d' because
nothing is irrelevant.  So the lexer would go for the longest match,
making `2d' the token, but then complain when it isn't a NUMBER, because
of the unused `d', nor an ORDINAL?

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy