The previous discussion that Branden cited offered no significant data about the value of stripping. I had given one example of a complicated scientific paper with lots of pic, eqn, and tbl, typset with the relatively simple -ms package. Stripping made essentially no difference in the overall run time.
Perhaps a more complicated macro package, especially one that places comments within macro definitions, would feel a greater effect--even more so if preprocessors were not involved. So I put together a -ms test with no preprocessors. The input was about 1 MB, comprising 30K lines of which 8000 were macro calls. I padded every line of s.tmac that did not end in \ or \c with a 32-character comment. Thus macro expansions were laden with comments. The variance in running times pretty well swamped the difference between -ms padded and unpadded. The difference was at most a few percent. With Peter preferring to distribute -mom unstripped, it's hard to find an argument for default stripping. Maybe mandoc doesn't want to give it up. If so, let it have it and stew in its own complexity, while all the rest get freed from meddling. Doug
