> or perhaps it was considered but consciously rejected because > situations existed where it would be detrimental?
It could have been to make sections more conspicuous in text editors, making it easier for the author to spot sections when skimming a file. Doubt there was any syntax highlighting back then... =) Plus it's easier to search for a section name if you know in advance it'll always be in uppercase, which I guess spares you the effort of remembering to do a case-sensitive search in vi or whatever... On Mon, 17 Dec 2018 at 06:59, Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Tadziu, > > Tadziu Hoffmann wrote on Sun, Dec 16, 2018 at 07:08:06PM +0100: > > Ingo Schwarze wrote: > > >> Jerry Saltzer's RUNOFF (1964) did not have a .tr request, [...] > >> By AT&T Version 3 UNIX (1973), nroff(1) did have it, [...] > > > Doug McIlroy's GECOS runoff had it > > Interesting. > Oh yes, now that you point me to it, > i see it in the source code. > > > (the memo from 1969 > > even mentions its utility in creating unpaddable spaces), > > so I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that this feature had also > > been adopted in Unix nroff from the beginning. > > That does seem likely, then. > > >> so it's not clear to me whether unix v1 roff(1) already > >> supported the .tr request. But even if it did, that > >> would not have helped: programmable macros only appeared > >> in nroff(1), in 1972, at least a year after the v1 manual > >> pages were completed - let alone begun. > > > I see. So while the v3 nroff manual page already mentions > > macros (and the .tr request), the manual page itself was > > still written using raw nroff requests. For v4 the manpages > > *were* rewritten to use macros (so it's not like editing all > > the manpages was considered too much work at the time), > > Major formatting changes occurred at least three times: > > * AT&T Version 4 Unix: use of the first macro sets: > man0/naa (74 lines) and man0/taa (91 lines). > * AT&T Version 7 Unix: use of the new man(7) macros (267 lines) > * 4.4BSD: use of the new mdoc(7) macros (4620 lines) > > Approximate numbers of manual pages: > > * AT&T Version 3 Unix (1973): 220 13k lines 53k words 305kB > * AT&T Version 4 Unix (1973): 262 > * AT&T Version 6 Unix (1975): 253 > * AT&T Version 7 Unix (1979): 301 > * 3BSD (1980): 401 > * 4.0BSD: (1980): 438 > * 4.1BSD: (1981): 439 > * 4.2BSD: (1983): 688 > * 4.3BSD-Tahoe: (1988): 966 > * 4.3BSD-Reno: (1990): 1220 175k lines 840k words 5200kB > * 4.4BSD: (1993): 1461 > * 4.4BSD-Lite1: (1994): 1178 > * 4.4BSD-Lite2: (1995): 1199 > * OpenBSD-current: (2018): 3387 850k lines 4400k words 27MB > (base only, without X and ports) > > So it is hundred times the volume now compared to v4, > or five times the volume that Cynthia had to handle when > she did her rewrite. And i doubt that OpenBSD is the largest > system out there. > > Of course, in the case at hand, we are only talking about the .Sh/.SH > lines; still, a quick grep gives me 23k of those in the OpenBSD > base system alone - more than the complete text of the v4 manuals. > Some of that can certainly be automated, but it still needs > proofreading, and the automation is not completely trivial. > > > but auto-capitalization for section headers was not considered -- > > or perhaps it was considered but consciously rejected because > > situations existed where it would be detrimental? > > Doug or Ken may know that; i don't. > > Yours, > Ingo > >
