C/A/T troff bug with -mm macros (4.3BSD)

[Henry McGilton -- Software Products]

In article <336 at vidiot.UUCP>, brown at vidiot.UUCP (Vidiot) writes:

    *  Wait-a-minute!  What is a \g command?

The  \g  escape sequence reads out the current interpolation format
of a specified number register.

    *  My UNIX documentation books don't have any mention of it.
    *  This includes a book that cover DWB2.0.

Use  \gx  to obtain the interpolation format for register x.

Use  \g(xy  to obtain the interpolation format for register xy.

See the  .af  request for an explanation of interpolation formats.

As for your documentation, the documentation for DWB has
not been substantially updated or improved since 1976.
There were some perfunctory additions in the form of a
memorandum in 1982, and that's about it.  If you get DWB
documentation from A. T. T. today, you'll get essectially
the 1976 documentation plus a bunch of memoranda that
consitute updates to the original stuff.  Don't expect this
situation to change any time in the near future.  Keep
reading comp.text and comp.unix.questions for knowledge
about troff and friends.  This problem with the \g
sequence versus C/A/T troff comes up about once a month.

Amazing, really, that they are unable to use the so-called
Documentor's Workbench to write some new documentation.

When I was ready to post this, I noticed that it was cross posted
to comp.bugs.4bsd.  The original poster should really have checked
first before screaming `Bug!' on the net.  It's not a bug, it's
a result of zero support for C/A/T troff, and little more
than zero for ditroff.

	................ Henry
+-------------------+--------------------------+---------------------------+
| Henry McGilton    | Timesharing was the mass |                           |
| Sun Microsystems  | psychosis of the 1970's, | arpa: hmcgilton at sun.com   |
| 2550 Garcia       |   induced by invalid     | uucp: ...!sun!angel!henry |
| Mountain View, CA |   accounting methods.    |                           |
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