14 May
2018
14 May
'18
5:04 p.m.
Ditroff was reimplemented by Clark (IIRC) to create
today???s groff which takes mostly a superset of the ditroff input language.
Yep. In early C++ which I found questionable but he made it work.
One of the superset things is something I got him to do in pic, the
'i'th construct. This chunk of pic:
for i = 1 to units by 1 do {
line <-> dashed from `i'th [].C.s - (.10, 0) to \
last box.nw + (i/(units+1)*w, 0)
}
is part of the code that produces this:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/sunbox.pdf
and I could change "units" and have more or less machines. That's a
diagram
of the first cluster that Sun shipped, code named sunbox, shipped as
SparcCluster I. My baby, never went anywhere, but my product marketing
guy came up to me about a decade later, after Google was a thing, and
said "I guess you were right about that clustering idea" :)
Source for the diagram is here:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/pic/sunbox.pic
Traditional troff can't handle that unless someone backported the 'i'th
construct (which is obvious, right?).
--lm