Follow-up Comment #7, bug #67347 (group groff): [comment #4 comment #4:] > My *guess* is that someone thought "if \& is good, \) must be better!". > > But I'd say, "not if it delivers no marginal advantage where employed".
Your reasoning comes from an assumption that \& is the baseline version of the
escape, and \( is the variant.
This is a historically informed assumption, and is still idiomatic roff,
probably through a combination of history and inertia.
But nothing intrinsically makes \& the default version. One could just as
easily decide to employ \( by default unless they need \&'s particular
difference in end-of-sentence handling. This could especially be true of
anyone using the modern manuals, rather than existing corpus, as their primary
learning tool.
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