Re: Special characters

[H.Merijn Brand]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2023 02:46:34 -0500, "G. Branden Robinson" 
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Merijn,

Shorted reply. Might expand on this later

> At 2023-09-22T08:43:37+0200, H.Merijn Brand via wrote:
> > On Thu, 21 Sep 2023 18:51:42 +0000, Lennart Jablonka <humm@ljabl.com> 
> > wrote:  
>  [...]  
> > > 
> > > If you aren’t careful, you could evoke the impression your hyperbole
> > > is to be taken literally.  
> > 
> > :)  
> 
> There are many man pages that don't use the '~' input character at
> all.[1]  For instance, of the 58 page sources[2] in the groff source
> tree, 54 manage to do without it.  These constitute literally hundreds
> of pages of documentation (everything but eqn(1), groff_char(7),
> groff_diff(7), roff(7)).
> 
> The catastrophizing tone of your message is unwarranted and might

I realized when I re-read that this morning and apologized in my reply
I'll apologize again if that was not clear

> discourage people from correcting your inflated claims, since they don't
> appear well-founded in evidence in the first place--and we all know
> people for whom evidence-based reasoning is an unfamiliar process.

Thanks for the long and clear answer, which I have to re-read a few
times to get all of the implications. Thanks for the time and effort
you have put into it to clarify all the points.

nroff2man added for your amusement. It has never been my intention to
make that public, but feel free to do with it whatever you like.

Perl5 uses '~' and '^' quite a lot. '~' as part of '=~' operator is
probably the most widespread use and '^' inside regular expressions.

$ cd /pro/lib/perl5
$ find -name \*.pod                      | wc -l
23320
$ find -name \*.pod | xargs cat          | wc -l
13632497
$ find -name \*.pod | xargs grep -l '~'  | wc -l
2351
$ find -name \*.pod | xargs grep    '~'  | wc -l
17092
$ find -name \*.pod | xargs grep    '=~' | wc -l
9649
$ find -name \*.pod | xargs grep -l '\^' | wc -l
2501
$ find -name \*.pod | xargs grep    '\^' | wc -l
24955

$ find -name \*.pm | wc -l
124026
$ find -name \*.pm | xargs perl -ne'/^=/../^=cut/ and print'                | 
wc -l
17053316
$ find -name \*.pm | xargs perl -ne'/^=/../^=cut/ and print' | grep -a '~'  | 
wc -l
66181
$ find -name \*.pm | xargs perl -ne'/^=/../^=cut/ and print' | grep -a '\^' | 
wc -l
53464

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  https://tux.nl   Perl Monger   http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.37        porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and Linux
https://tux.nl/email.html http://qa.perl.org https://www.test-smoke.org

nroff2man
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