Follow-up Comment #5, bug #58682 (project groff):
[comment #4 comment #4:]
> I've tried to decide this with web searches. I get hits,
> but they rapidly become irrelevant, probably because "me"
> with "reference manual" just isn't distinctive enough.
I was more thinking that someone searching that phrase as a title would put
the whole things in quotes (which would prevent the revised title from
matching), but maybe your average googler doesn't worry about such niceties.
> it looks like Allman was depositing regex syntax into his
> explanation without warning
I don't think that's how he intended .*X -- I believe that's a literal dot
(technically not part of the macro name), a literal asterisk, and any letter
or digit. My reading is that the -me macro set defines no macros beginning
with an asterisk, thus those names are all up for grabs in user space.
> groff me(7) users are far less restricted with respect to
> naming their macros, thanks to the removed length limit.
That's probably the key thing to point out here: any name of three or more
characters is automatically safe from conflicts. With this freedom, modern
users are less likely to use potentially confusing characters like * in their
macro names at all.
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