Re: [groff] Creating a numbered list without macros

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ingo,

> > He may not know himself at this be largely based on indentation, for
> > example.
>
> That has been tried, with very poor results:
>
>   https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520

No, Markdown is far more complex that what I was suggesting.  The main
content of a novel needs to start a chapter and have paragraphs, and
Roman and italic text.  No indexing, footnotes would be unusual, no
lists, etc.

> and actually *harder* as soon as the task at hand becomes even mildly
> non-trivial.

As I've already said: we don't know, the task may be trivial.

> learning to read and write a natural language is many orders of
> magnitudes harder than something as simple as HTML or roff macros.

Not necessarily.  Plenty can write poorly, but still be understood by
another human reader.  Computers tend to want everything perfect; DWIM
is a bad idea.  Some folks just can't be sufficiently precise.

There's no point being prescriptive about what Yves should do.  Yes,
-mom would be a good back-end for him to target rather than pure troff.
If he's doing an MVP then he's finding out his audience and will better
understand their needs by putting something in front of them he can
constantly tinker and tailor before throwing it away.  It may be that
presenting the troff syntax of -mom has the majority stop there because
it's too much of a culture shock.

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