Re: [Groff] ASCII Minus Sign in man Pages.

[Doug McIlroy]

>> I think it's pretty hopeless to ask for AI that can tell
>> whether a pasted symbol is a hyphen or a minus sign.
>> The answer is likely to depend on whether it is being
>> pasted into a program or into a document.
>
> Right.  I'm happy for the typist to put in the effort.  Perhaps I'm
> getting too hung up on making the output be pasteable, but it's
> annoying, and not obvious to some, why `foo?bar' doesn't run when pasted
> from foo-bar(1).

Interesting difference in habits. I never look at groff-ed man pages on
line--only the default nroff, which is fine for pasting, and more
importantly, examinable with a full-featured editor.

And I don't see how a typist can foresee what I am going to
paste text into any better than AI can.  After all, I write
man pages and other documents *about* programs in volume
comparable to programs themselves.

Doug