On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff. I feel like there
was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose. So far
as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
originals.

I think you mean 'style' and 'diction'. I thought those came from research? I remember seeing papers about them in a manual; maybe 7th Ed or 4.2/4.3BSD? Similarly with learn: I have a vague memory of seeing it with BSD, but I thought it came from 6th or 7th edition. A quick look shows a copy in 7th Ed.

- Dan C.

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:55:24AM -0400, Clem cole wrote:
> The PWB children used -mm I seem to remember that the base system 3 and maybe the original sysv did not include it since troff was not apart. If you pulled from BSD or ditroff; you got it.
>
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.
>
> > On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Nemo <cym224@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 14/05/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> > > > I had a boss once who demanded that we learn -mm; for some reason I still
> > > > preferred -ms, as it somehow seemed more "natural", and I still use it to
> > > > this day (well, when I'm not using the Mac, that is).
> > >
> > > Why not? The Mac has it: /usr/share/groff/1.19.2/tmac/s.tmac
> >
> > I have some vague distant memory of a commercial Unix variant that came with troff and the -mm macros, but without -ms. I can't remember which it was (or if I'm just imagining things). Anyone have any ideas?
> >
> > - Dan C.
> >

--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm