15 Aug
2018
15 Aug
'18
2:29 a.m.
An arguable distinction:
I thought hard about claiming priority for -ms. Joe Ossanna intended
option -m to foster macro packages from the outset. -man was an early use,
hidden in the man command. But -man was not packaged (in the sense of
being an announced feature that can be used from its external description)
until v7. -ms appeared in v6.
Doug
Arnold Robbins <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Or say, rather, the first *general purpose* macro package. The man
macros predate it. :-)
Why
create ms when you have mm?
Well, the real reason is that ms was the very first macro package.
It has held up spectactularly well, evolving much less than the
underlying [ntg]roff.
Doug