> In that light, inventing .ec was a terrible language design > mistake that should never have been permitted. It was also > absolutely useless, which i have proven by implementing logic > in the mandoc pre-parser that eliminates .ec before even > starting the main parse sequence. So all that can be done > with .ec can trivially be done without it as well.
Here I must disagree. I found .ec very helpful in implementing floats, where escapes must be evaluated during (delayed) rendering, and not when the content is originally read. The idea here is to allow escapes to be used identically in floats and normal running text, without forcing the user to explicitly escape all escapes in floats. (I think this is particularly useful when eqn-processed material is used in floats, where the user has no real control over the escapes.) I have no idea how I could have managed without using .ec to deactivate escapes in the float, while still having the escape mechanism functional for use by the macro itself.
