On 02.12.25 03:42, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > Hi dvalin--,
> Off-topic, but I'm curious...where did this practice of suffixing user > names with multiple hyphen-minuses come from? Nary the foggiest, Branden - here in your post's quote is the first time I've seen it. It does not appear in the Bcc back here, of that post. Mystery == Total. > > At 2025-12-02T09:05:59+0000, dvalin--- via GNU roff typesetting system > discussion wrote: > > > .cflags 5 \[em] ... > The idea I've been carrying around in my head looks somewhat like the > "symbolic" form of the chmod(1) command. > > Some examples should get the idea across. > > .warn +delim > .warn -char > .warn =all > .warn =w-delim > .warn -w+syntax+reg+mac > > All of these are currently invalid syntax, so this should be a > compatible extension. That syntax hides the OR/AND in a most user-friendly fashion, I think. (And I'm inordinately fond of explicit human-readable syntax.) If there's less wrangling of a hand-knitted parsing engine, then that's so much more viable, I figure. > [snip] > > Here [in AVR assembly language] that implementational detail is > > exposed, but in groff, implementation is best hidden, I figure. > > I agree. GNU troff extrapolated from AT&T troff's `hy` request. > > ...which, itself, I'd like to shove into a dusty corner for legacy > features. > https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?55070 > > But ORing of named flags seems to be significantly more readable than > > groff syntax. Neh? > > Even a bitwise or logical "or" is more of a demand upon the user than we > need to make. Why not plus, minus, and equals (in the assignment > idiom[1])? You've won my vote, though it's only that of a groff beginner trampling the edges of the maze, when time permits. ... > [1] ...which I have problems with, since ":=" should be assignment and > "=" should be equality. But the latter is a bit of brain damage C > programmers cherish even as they consider themselves far superior to > those who learned Microsoft BASIC, which does the same thing. Put it down to C exposure, but "==" for equality test, and "=" seem nearly good enough. However, ":=" and "==" is a more secure combination, as omission of one "=" doesn't silently convert a test to an assignment. (Who has never had to debug that one?) > (At least Dartmouth BASIC [and ANSI Minimal BASIC] required `LET` to > make the context clear. Also, did these snooty C hackers ever > notice that Ken Thompson himself wrote a BASIC interpreter?) > > https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2021-December/024944.html Haven't done that, but I did write a Z80 two-pass assembler, pre-millennium. (Don't tell anyone, but that was in BASIC.) I've done a bit of lex & yacc - enough to get the hang of its limited debugging. A formal grammar is a stricture, but sanity-preserving in the long run. Your courage in facing an inherited hand-knitted if-but-maybe machine is awe-inspiring. I'd scream and run. All power to your arm, and thanks for tolerating notions from those in the back row. Regards, Erik
