> These changes may, must, shall, should be undone. I'd like to think the message was postmarked April 1, but it wasn't.
> "and more recently, McIlroy referred to it as a ``living fossil''." ... > "A living fossil" is a sign of a successful species (function). > And now this species shall be "castrated" on the altar of an ideology, > "all shall be the same (similar)". I concede the persistence of horseshoe crabs. But "castrate" is exactly the opposite of the evolutionary advance to which the message objects. Evolution sometimes leaves vestigial organs, sometimes innocuous, but sometimes problematic--as with the human appendix and \s. In programming-language syntax, "All shall be the same" is an ideal, not an ideology. The great John Cocke once told me, "Doug, you've got to understand that Fortran is not a mathematical language or a logical language; it's a natural language," meaning that Fortran grew by accretion as it was built, for at that time rational language-design principles had not yet arisen. And so it was with novel corners of troff. > Who asked for changes and how? I'll take the fall for the initial complaint. The move to fix it was the upshot of an extensive discussion on this mailing list. > [It will] cause a regression Yes. Among my nearly 250 -ms files that comprise nearly 100,000 lines of text, four are affected. Three of these had already been modified to accommodate another (completely arbitrary) deviation of Groff from Troff--the reversal of Pic's light-dark scale for area fill. Far more significantly, every file that originated before my use of Groff has been or still must be modified to recover from the revised syntax that allows longer request names. That change was made for compelling reasons analogous to those behind the \s fix. The latter fix is comparatively benign from a regression standpoint, and firmly within Groff's modest reform tradition--a total cure for a significant speech defect. Doug
