Follow-up Comment #14, bug #68133 (group groff):
> If I sound unimpressed and underwhelmed by objections to this change, then
> giving the foregoing some consideration in one's protests might overcome my
> skepticism.
Consider it considered. I realise there're too many factors at play here that
I'm not adequately familiar with, and I admit your knowledge of this area
exceeds mine by an order of magnitude. I'm already coming to terms with the
fact I'm gonna have to rewrite Mono.tmac to remove C0 control characters, so I
guess I'll dejectedly replace `.tr` requests with two versions (one for Groff
that users `.char`, and another for older Troff flavours).
> 2. When in compatibility mode:
> a. If the transformation is one expected by a "historically significant"
> document (q.v.), quietly perform it.
This dichotomic approach to what Groff is designed to do concerns me. There
shouldn't be a damn difference in the behaviour of a quote-unquote
“historically significant” document to one that's been written yesterday.
Also, I've no idea how you'd identify a document's “historicity”. Isn't
compatibility mode enough?
> "Breaking changes" are the way of nearly all software that is actively
> developed, because programmers are not possessed of supernatural foresight.
Nor should programmers be wont to break things for the sake of “cleaning
up” what they perceive to be "obsolete" or "unused" parts of a language. If
something needs to break, it should be for a damn good reason that's pellucid
to the language's users.
But this remark also leaves me worried about other Roff languages features
that might one day find themselves on the chopping block because new GNU
extensions provide the “correct” way of meta-programming. So I might wake
up one day and see that `.ec`, `.eo`, `.cc`, `.c2` have been axed in favour of
some futuristic Roff syntax that went full Vim 9 by introducing functional
programming features (lambdas, closures, lexical binding, scopes/local
variables, etc). But at least the old, ugly forms of meta-programming are
sandboxed to compatibility mode! (Provided your document qualifies as
“historically significant”…)
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