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

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Ralph,

At 2022-03-21T10:24:06+0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Branden,
> 
> > At 2022-03-20T10:48:56+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> > > > When a double-quoted word is not space-separated from an adjacent
> > > > word, it's not considered a different argument _except_ if if is
> > > > the first argument.
> > > 
> > > That description is inaccurate.  It has nothing to do with whether
> > > or not it is the first argument.
> >
> > Right.  Ralph was probably thinking of `ds`.
> 
> I did not write what Ingo quotes, nor does he attribute it to me.

No indeed; due perhaps to some confusion of my own, I was referring to
the message below.

At 2022-03-20T10:06:14+0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Ingo,
> 
> > but the roff(7) manual in the mandoc package says this:
> ...
> >     Leaving out the terminating double quote character at the end of
> >     the line is discouraged.
> 
> I think that's idiomatic and an early thing one learns about troff's
> ‘strings’ compared to programming languages in order to read others'
> troff.
> 
> CSTR 54, §7.3 Arguments, ends with ‘A trailing double quote may be
> omitted’ without recommending against doing so.

I believe I was thinking that one could extrapolate from `ds` request
syntax, and the citation you make above, a practice of _consistently_
omitting trailing quotes from both `ds` invocations and (final) macro
call arguments, and I wanted to come down on the other side of such a
proposition.

It's possible that I have fought too long with contrarians, and become
one myself...

Regards,
Branden

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