Re: [Groff] mdoc considered harmful

[Eric S. Raymond]

Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden>:
> Yes, .Xo/.Xc is slightly ugly, but you don't have to use it if
> you don't like it. 

You can't tell me it's optional.  It's in the corpus and doclifter has to
cope with it somehow.

> > The result is pure hell for anyone trying to interpret the mess with
> > anything but groff itself.
> 
> It is not completely trivial to parse correctly,
> but you are exaggerating massively here.

Yeah?  Sometime, go look at the percentage of doclifter's complexity budget
dedicated to mdoc, then try to tell me I'm exaggerating.  It's the second
worst hairball in the code after command-synopsis parsing.  If I hadn't
pulled a dangerous trick to expand out mdoc's synopsis markup early it
would be the *worst* hairball.  I'm still worried that trick is going
to come back and bite me.

> Maybe i should have a look at doclifter and provide hints
> or send patches...  :)

Maybe you should.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>