Re: [Groff] Question about .substring

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Steffen,

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote on Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 11:45:04AM +0100:
> Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Steffen Nurpmeso wrote on Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 06:09:08PM +0100:

>>> For S-roff i will add a .substr request which takes an index and

>> Please don't.  That is completely equivalent and trivial to convert
>> in either direction, so it merely bloats the user interface for no

> Oh yes i will.. starting with a roff macro.

What a pity.  I see you are already working hard to be incompatible
before you have even made your first release.  That's not going to
help adoption.  That said, i'll probably shut up about similar
issues in the future because, well, a competing package that is
being gratuitiously incompatible is not going to go anywhere, so
commenting on it is likely a waste of time...  :-(

Yours,
  Ingo


>> While i like some aspects of Perl, lets not adopt the "there's
>> more than one way to do it" abomination into roff.  A concise,
>> consistent user interface is an asset.

> While that is true...  The current behaviour is an unusable
> mystery to me personally: how can you gain a substring of length
> null,

  .rm myname
  .ds myname ""
  .ds myname \&

Choose depending on what you want to do with it.

> for example, and without introducing lengthy calculations

Lengthy?  If you have the offset and length (> 0), all it takes
is one addition and decrementing by one.