From: ldo@nz.invalid   
      
   On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 21:35:42 -0500, Gary Scott wrote:   
      
   > On 10/5/2024 8:58 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:   
   >   
   >> How could it have been better without regular expressions?   
   >   
   > Extremely powerful substitution ...   
      
   But without regular expressions, that kind of thing gets quite limited.   
      
   > full control of fonts, code points, code pages, dynamically controlled   
   > overprinting, image handling ...   
      
   troff was doing this sort of thing years before. Remember that the Unix   
   folks at Bell Labs got the funding to develop their new OS primarily on   
   the rationale that it would offer good text-processing facilities, like   
   you describe.   
      
   > direct/binary datastream writing/editing, formatting page columns,   
   > gutters, running headings/footings, tables, lists (order, unordered,   
   > etc.) ...   
      
   I notice no mention of line-numbering. That’s rather crucial for legal   
   documents -- another selling point that the Bell Labs folks were able to   
   address.   
      
   > ... full support for foreign languages, double byte character sets   
   > decades before unicode ...   
      
   I don’t know why you think that was such a radical feature, given that the   
   Koreans introduced their national double-byte code in 1974, the Japanese   
   theirs in 1978, and the Chinese did GB2312 in 1980.   
      
   > Directly define your own gml (predecessor to html) tags.   
      
   troff incorporated the idea of macros right from the beginning.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)