At 2022-03-20T12:59:38+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > But since modern manual pages are mostly written and maintained > by people used to younger languages, i still think the following > advice is useful to avoid confusion of modern manual page maintainers: > If you quote a macro argument, always provide the closing quote, > even at the end of the input line where the roff language regards > it as optional.
I agree. There is also the point that man(7) and mdoc(7) both offer macros that accept many arguments. If the last argument is quoted, ending it with a double quote, superfluously to irritable old graybeards, preserves its robustness in revision when someone tacks on "just one more argument". Kernighan made a similar point about semicolons in Pascal. (If I remember correctly, ANSI didn't get this memo when they introduced array-of-struct initializers to C, nor did they correct this defect in initializers for arrays of primitives.) Regards, Branden
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
