On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 01:52:04AM +0200, Gunnar Ritter wrote:
> :
> All variants of the original -mm which I have seen so far
> have been very similar. It is likely that they all use the
> :p register in the same way.
One definition of backward compatibility is "All Bugs Are Preserved".
The current mm macros make good use of the wider-than-2-characters name
space, for which I am very grateful. I accept that my older troff documents
that reach under the curtain and twiddle hidden state will break. Fortunately
I _usually_ restrained myself, but ...
Personally, I'm not interested in preserving (most) undocumented "features" of
past implimentations of mm . I am interested in fixing real bugs and adding
some carefully considered new capabilities.
So I ask the question of the group:
Do we want to implement "backward compatibility" of undocumented
things like the number register :p in the groff package?
I vote no.
--
Mike Bianchi
