Re: [Groff] Lack of professionalism, thinking, education, understanding, wisdom, consequences, [references] ...

[Werner LEMBERG]

>  1. While explicit braces for blocks indeed reduce the risk to
>     introduce future errors by adding requests, adding redundant
>     braces makes the code longer, more deeply indented, and sometimes
>     harder to read, [...]

And, perhaps most important: It makes execution slower!  Contrary to
TeX, groff doesn't have an internal representation form of macros.
This means that a macro gets interpreted exactly as written.  For
example, if a macro that contains a line to call a request has 100
spaces after the leading dot, the 100 spaces are interpreted again and
again if you execute the macro.  Consequently, `make install' strips
(almost) all spaces from the mdoc macro files before they get
installed.  Similarly, the `doc-' prefix gets removed to make the
commands shorter.

The same is true for \{ ... \}, of course.  If they can be safely
omitted, it makes the code faster – maybe such micro-optimizations are
no longer important today, but comparing a call of mdoc with and
without spaces removed makes a difference of more than 50% in speed on
my old laptop, IIRC.  [Note that you have to slightly massage the mdoc
macros if you want to call them without stripped spaces.]

Bjarni, have you ever looked at `compressed' JavaScript code?  For
example, the very frequently used `jquery-1.11.0.min.js' file looks
like this:

  /*! jQuery v1.11.0 | (c) 2005, 2014 jQuery Foundation, Inc. | 
jquery.org/license */
  !function(a,b){ ... [32327 characters follow on this line] ...
  }}function S(a,b,c){ ... [31990 characters follow on this line] ...
  },a,b,arguments.length>1)}, ...[31915 characters follow on this line] ...

This is *completely* incomprehensible, but it speeds up loading the
file since it is only a third of the original size (which you can also
download from `jquery.com', BTW).  So it is not only groff that uses
similar techniques to save some processing or loading time.

> To be constructive, here is a patch to fix the warning in question.

Applied to git, thanks.


    Werner