Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News documentation written with -ms nroff macro
Message-ID: <1989Jul21.170545.15365@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Jul15.195651.5979@ivucsb.sba.ca.us> <1989Jul16.021612.13393@utzoo.uucp> <736@toro.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 89 17:05:45 GMT

In article <736@toro.UUCP> nick@toro.UUCP (Nicholas Jacobs) writes:
>When I received my B News 2.11 tape from NCR, it contained a macro package
>called mn. I realize that this Yet Another Macro Package...

Indeed it is.  Quite unnecessarily, too.  We think designing a new user
interface for a macro package is grossly misplaced creativity; there is
nothing badly wrong with the existing ones, especially -ms, unless your
needs are seriously exotic.

We wrote the C News documentation with -ms simply because that's the one
we know and like.  Since we never do anything hairy with the macros, you
can read most of the documentation easily by just ignoring the macros
entirely and reading the words.  The ms-subset-lookalike that will be in
the next patch was a couple of hours of work for me one evening, when I
was feeling bored and wanted to try something different.  We don't think
it's very important, but since I did do it, it's worth including.

Had we started from scratch with the aim of including our own macro package,
we almost certainly would have taken the same approach -- reimplementing
a -ms subset.  We see no point in being deliberately incompatible with
existing practice unless it buys us something important.  There is a
problem in that half the existing world speaks -ms and the other half
speaks -mm (we will quietly refrain from discussing brain-dead suppliers
of so-called "UNIX" who don't give you any formatter at all...), but
being compatible with half the world is better than nothing.
-- 
1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo.  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu