Re: [groff] Design and Implementation of *roff

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> Mirfak is the brightest star in the constellation of Perseus,
> in which the second brightest start is ALGOL!

Fascinating!  The name attests to a certain ambition, and
from what I've gathered, upon publication of a paper on
Mirfac there was a bit of back-and-forth in the journals
between the proponents of "natural-language programming"
(which has birthed such languages as Flow-Matic, Cobol, and
this Mirfac) and those who opined that the entire concept
was flawed and bound to fail (among them Edsger Dijkstra).


(I wonder how the two camps would have rated the roff
language.  I suspect it wouldn't have received top marks
from either side...  :-)