Tadziu Hoffmann <hoffm...@usm.uni-muenchen.de> wrote: | lots of interesting stuff skipped
|As an aside at the end, I'm surprised that no-one has yet |pointed out the obvious: we're working with a macro |processor, where the natural block structuring element |is not a tacked-on brace structure, but the *macro*! |And another example, since something similar had come up: | | .de inlist? | .ie \\n(.$<2 .nr result 0 | .el .inlist1 \\$@ | .. | .de inlist1 | .ie '\\$1'\\$2' .nr result 1 | .el .inlist2 \\$@ | .. | .de inlist2 | .ds _1 \\$1 | .shift 2 | .inlist? \\*(_1 \\$@ | .. | .ds fruit apple banana lemon grape | .ds myfruit lemon | .inlist? \*[myfruit] \*[fruit] | .ie \n[result] Yes, ``\*[myfruit]'' is in ``\*[fruit]''. | .el No, ``\*[myfruit]'' is not in ``\*[fruit]''. | |Programming roff is a bit like programming in assembler: |complex expressions are built up piece by piece using simple |instructions, and temporary registers are a useful aid, not |something that must be avoided at all costs. Nice. But it won't match ".ds myfruit \&lemon", to give one example. I know of no way to get at the plain "lemon" in "\&lemon", which is a complete stopper for any generic programming, whatever conditional or recursive functional approach there is used. Not being able to return a value is a thing that i also miss a lot. Having a last-macro-return-value register would be nice in my opinion. Unfortunately ".return anything" yet exists and has special semantics, so a ".retval VALUE" or the like would be necessary. Variables with macro-local (namespace) scope would also be a real improvement: since you've mentioned the shell, ".local [ds|nr] xy" comes to mind. In the end the best would be if any user can use the syntax he (or she -- really?) likes the most, and it should just work. So this makes .tostring, .returnval and .local. --steffen
