Re: [BUG] groff: inconsistent behavior of " to separate arguments

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2022-03-20T12:59:38+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> But since modern manual pages are mostly written and maintained
> by people used to younger languages, i still think the following
> advice is useful to avoid confusion of modern manual page maintainers:
> If you quote a macro argument, always provide the closing quote,
> even at the end of the input line where the roff language regards
> it as optional.

I agree.

There is also the point that man(7) and mdoc(7) both offer macros that
accept many arguments.  If the last argument is quoted, ending it with a
double quote, superfluously to irritable old graybeards, preserves its
robustness in revision when someone tacks on "just one more argument".

Kernighan made a similar point about semicolons in Pascal.  (If I
remember correctly, ANSI didn't get this memo when they introduced
array-of-struct initializers to C, nor did they correct this defect in
initializers for arrays of primitives.)

Regards,
Branden

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