Hi Branden,
> To the broader group, I would furthermore suggest that, being GNU roff,
> it might behoove us to preserve the above "accident of history" only in
> compatibility mode, and have the \sn form accept only a single-digit
> argument for consistency with other escape forms. Doug still would have
> gotten into trouble, but it would have been a more easily understood
> trouble.
No, this is a bad idea. Many of us are used to typing \s16 and knowing
it works, and Doug and others would be in trouble in the usual case
rather than the unusual.
Doug's idea of \s314 being 314, not 31, is better, but the effect can
already be achieved with groff's existing extension of (xx to [yyy...]
as shown with
$ groff -Z <<<'\s3939\s[40]40\s[314]314' |
> egrep '^[st]'
troff: <standard input>:1: warning [p 1, 0.0i]: can't break line
s39000
t39
s40000
t40
s314000
t314
$
--
Cheers, Ralph.
