Re: groff/-mandoc replacement (OT)

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> Using .bL here, you get correct output now (also at the expense of
>>> conceptually incorrect input),
>> I'm not sure I agree with the parenthesis here.  [...]
> My statement was based on the premise that the correct place for the
> blank line is in the automatically generated output from the list
> macros, not in an explicit .Pp or .bL.  In this respect, both .Pp and
> .bL are conceptually incorrect.

Ah!  Yes, I see what you mean, and in that sense, I agree.

>> True.  I would prefer to build a .bL that generates a collapsing
>> blank line more or less the same way .Pp does.  [...]
> Why not simply have your macro call .Pp,

In part, because I didn't think of it.

I suspect I didn't think of it because, even if it's hidden inside
another macro, I consider .Pp to be "paragraph break" markup and thus
wrong for this use.  For exmaple - probably largely because of my TeX
experience - I think of a paragraph as including leading indentation,
though when I actually think about it I know that manpage paragraphs
don't.  Using .Pp, even embedded in another macro, feels wrong because
it conceptually includes requesting everything a paragraph break does,
including such things as indentation.  That the current implementation
does not actually provide indentation is mostly irrelevant to this.
(.Lp does not feel as wrong, even if it is currently defined in terms
of .Pp, because an mdoc version that did indent would presumably also
change .Lp appropriately - it's on the other side of "accident of the
implementation" line.)

> or the groff-specific ".paragraph" that .Pp calls?

That, I wasn't aware of.  I haven't even looked at the mdoc macro
package, largely because in my past peeks at roff macros I have found
them totally opaque.  I've learnt just barely enough roff to construct
the .bL I quoted upthread; this is not enough to make sense of anything
the least bit complicated.  This means I haven't looked at the mdoc
source at all.  (Indeed, looking now, I can't find it.  On my 1.4T I
can find a definition of .Pp, but it doesn't use .paragraph.  On a 3.1
machine, I can't find a definition of .Pp, except a doc2html.tmac
definition which is not relevant here.  I'm obviously still missing
something important.)

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