> I want to reply to both of your mails here in one mail. First,
> constructing the variable names piece by piece and maintaining
> multiple variables to simulate arrays does seem to me to be kludgy.
Mhmm, in TeX you have basically the same limitations. Both groff and
TeX languages are not well suited to such operations. Recently, TeX
has been extended with a lua interpreter: luaTeX; this seems to be the
future, since complete support for OpenType has been already
implemented.
> I got a reply from Tadziu Hoffman who gave me an idea of making a
> real stack,
As I mentioned in a previous mail, this works fine for arguments
without spaces only.
> OK, off to your 2nd email, saying roughly that you didn't think I
> should want to use your www.tmac code to implement anything to fix
> the mm code, but you were only too happy, anyways, to accept patches
> to the www.tmac code.
This is bad wording from my side: I was talking about the high-level
API as given in www.tmac. There are two different approaches how to
have HTML support w.r.t. lists in mm. The first one is to use mm list
macros to get the right output with grohtml. The second one is to use
extended HTML features, not covered by mm macros at all. To implement
the former you should do it similar to the ms package, this is, using
the low-level macros from www.tmac only. Everything for the latter
should go into www.tmac.
> It left me a bit confused ... I would *think* that a bit of extra
> code to the mm macros so that they referenced your www.tmac in case
> of html output would be a good idea.
Yes. Sorry for being imprecise.
> I wouldn't mind changing things to do it, but the fixes are not
> exactly minor:
I don't mind large changes. However, before you start, please present
your ideas here on the list (even if pseudocode only). Additionally,
I need a copyright disclaimer before I can apply non-trivial patches
to groff (this is, patches longer than about 20 changed code lines);
it takes a few weeks until this has been processed by the FSF, then I
can proceed.
> I got the idea that you wanted me not to embroil you further,
Well, I'll always try to give advice and check code, but please don't
expect more.
Werner
