Hi Ingo, > seemed to indicate that the execution time benefit is roughly > consistent with what one would expect if it were mainly due to the > simple reduction of the macro file size:
The rule of thumb I've often heard is the lexer is the bottleneck. I haven't time to dig right now, but I've one more datum to throw in. $ strace -fc man bash >/dev/null % time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 42.86 0.439904 14663 30 4 wait4 26.86 0.275675 13 20625 2 write 25.39 0.260614 13 20443 read ... That's a large page, and it's measuring man, tbl, col, and the rest of the gang, not just nroff processing macro files, but it shows I/O dominates. > a) You mean that savings of 5-20% in execution time are > "significant", even though formatting with mandoc would save about > 60-90% of formatting time instead? Yes, because we're not moving to mandoc. We are going to format with nroff and troff because we like it. :-) -- Cheers, Ralph. https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy