Re: weird \s

[Doug McIlroy]

> These changes may, must, shall, should be undone.

I'd like to think the message was postmarked April 1, but it wasn't.

> "and more recently, McIlroy referred to it as a ``living fossil''."
...
> "A living fossil" is a sign of a successful species (function).

> And now this species shall be "castrated" on the altar of an ideology,
> "all shall be the same (similar)".

I concede the persistence of horseshoe crabs. But "castrate" is exactly
the opposite of the evolutionary advance to which the message objects.
Evolution sometimes leaves vestigial organs, sometimes innocuous, but
sometimes problematic--as with the human appendix and \s.

In programming-language syntax, "All shall be the same" is an ideal,
not an ideology. The great John Cocke once told me, "Doug, you've got
to understand that Fortran is not a mathematical language or a logical
language; it's a natural language," meaning that Fortran grew by accretion
as it was built, for at that time rational language-design principles
had not yet arisen. And so it was with novel corners of troff.

> Who asked for changes and how?

I'll take the fall for the initial complaint. The move to fix it was
the upshot of an extensive discussion on this mailing list.

> [It will] cause a regression

Yes. Among my nearly 250 -ms files that comprise nearly 100,000 lines
of text, four are affected. Three of these had already been modified
to accommodate another (completely arbitrary) deviation of Groff from
Troff--the reversal of Pic's light-dark scale for area fill.

Far more significantly, every file that originated before my use of Groff
has been or still must be modified to recover from the revised syntax that
allows longer request names. That change was made for compelling reasons
analogous to those behind the \s fix. The latter fix is comparatively
benign from a regression standpoint, and firmly within Groff's modest
reform tradition--a total cure for a significant speech defect.

Doug