Re: [TUHS] roff(7)

No way. Ossanna deserves all the praise you give him. Roff extended runoff in various ways: relative numeric operators, e.g. .in +8 tabbing (left, right and centered) underlining tripartite headers and footers arabic and roman page numbering adjustable head and foot margins automatic hyphenation, thanks to Molly Wagner footnotes merge patterns for change marks, column separators, etc. various special requests: .ne, .ti, .tr, .po, .op (odd page) But roff did NOT have conditionals, traps, special characters, environments, or arbitrary motion control. Crucially (and ironically, because I was Mr. Macro), it did not have anything like macros, strings and diversions until after Joe pioneered them in nroff. So there was a gaping disparity: nroff was Turing complete, roff wasn't. Roff merely added features to runoff; nroff leapt into a different universe. ----------------------- The features listed above are in the January 1971 manual for BCPL roff, which is probably the anonymous reference cited in the November 1971 v1 manual. The v1 manual lists Osanna, Ken and Dennis as authors of the Unix implementation. I believe Ossanna is named because he added line-numbering--and maybe more--to entice the patent department to switch to roff. BCPL roff allowed all four arithmetic operators in contexts like .ls *3. Only + and - were allowed in nroff. Eventually both BCPL roff and nroff got number registers (defined by different commands); I don't recall which came first. BCPL roff also got a weak macro facility, definitely after nroff. Doug