26 Aug
2017
26 Aug
'17
12:27 a.m.
Slight digression:
As a *roff fan, I'd love, love, love to see the
original roff sources.
The *original* original (Unix) roff (not sure if there was
a precursor elsewhere) was in pdp-11 assembly.
It was hand-translated to assembly-like C somewhere back
in the v6-ish time frame, certainly soon enough to become
nroff and troff in Phototypesetter V6.
(It wasn't until Kernighan rewrote it that it became sort
of reasonable, but that was much later. I vaguely recall
trying to fix something in the nroff or troff source in
4.xBSD-on-the-VAX, and wow, that code was awful, on the same
scale as the original vi perhaps.)
Especially anything that uses pic/eqn/chem/etc.
I remember using tbl and eqn on the 4.xBSD VAX. (We did not have
pic at that time.) Then we got TeX and I did everything new in
TeX if possible, but I did actually miss tbl: while its
*formatting* was not so great, it was a much better *markup*
language than original or later LaTeX table constructs.
Chris