Re: Novel use of .char

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2024-12-18T01:04:58+0100, Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
> > Wrapping a diversion inside a character definition is indeed a
> > novel thing to do.  At first blush, I admire the creativity.
> > At second blush, the prescriptivist and black-gloved input
> > validator in me recoils.  ("Why isn't this banned?" he roars.)
> > My third reaction is as a system designer; we should allow
> > such feature composition unless we have a _good_ reason not to.
> 
> Macro processing is all about string expansion, and in troff,
> macros and diversions (and character definitions in groff)
> are also just special forms of strings, so there is no
> a priori reason this should not work.
> However, I suspect there might be difficulties in some
> circumstances (e.g., when used as argument in a macro call)
> if the expanded material contains newlines.

Yes.  This may lie at the heart of Savannah #66443, which in turn is an
issue onf raised a couple of months ago.

https://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2024-10/msg00039.html

Regards,
Branden

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