[bug #62233] [doc] Stop referring to Roff as a group of languages

[John Gardner]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #62233 (project groff):

Let's be practical. Users know Roff when they see it: a backslash-laden markup
language punctuated by directives that begin with a full-stop or apostrophe at
the very beginning of a line, often with terse, cryptic-looking names. This
description fits AT&T, GNU, and Heirloom's input syntaxes equally well, and
these distinctive qualities are immediately recognisable even to readers with
minimal exposure to the Troff system.

On the other hand, users aren't going to discriminate between implementations
when reading a document's source code. Nobody opens an .ms file and thinks "Is
this language GNU Roff or Heirloom Roff"? Hell, with the amount of overlap
between modern implementations, it won't always be possible to distinguish
which flavour of Troff a document was written for (particularly in macro
packages).

Ergo, readers will understand what _"the roff language"_ refers to, but how
they interpret _"roff languages"_ depends largely on their awareness of other
Troff implementations, and/or whether their exposure to Troff extends beyond
cargo-culted man(7) pages.

> I've never seen a BNF-style grammar for it

Because *BNF grammars are ill-equipped to describe languages that can modify
the rules of their own syntax at runtime. TeX
<https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4205> is the better-known example of such a
language, but this applies to Roff as well.

> C programmers speak even to each other in terms of "C99", "C11", "K&R C"

Yes, but nobody considers C99 a different language to C11, or C89, right?
Rather, they're acknowledged to be different revisions of a standard that
build on the one that preceded it.


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