Hi Mike, > > But - has always meant hyphen in pre-groff troff because it's a lot > > more common to want a hyphen in writing than a minus sign. > > _I_ would claim this interpretation was a mistake.
Well, 7th Ed. documents that have `.if n' and `.if t' use - for an English hyphen and \- for a numeric minus, e.g. http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/ratfor/m2 As a useful example, consider this problem: the variable .UL f is to be set to \-1 if .UL x is less than zero, to +1 if .UL x is greater than 100, and to 0 otherwise. Following an .UL else with an .UL if is one way to write a multi-way branch in Ratfor. And CSTR 54, 23.2 Font description files says - is the same as \(hy for the PostScript printer they use as an example. Each line following charset describes one character: its name, its width..., ..., and a decimal, ... value by which the output device knows it (the \N "number" of the character). ... If the width field contains ", the name is a synonym for the previous character. ... Here are excerpts from a typical font description file for the same Postscript printer. hy 33 0 45 hyphen \(hy - " - is a synonym for \(hy Q 72 3 81 a 44 0 97 b 50 2 98 I also found in 8th Ed. http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dan_Cross_v8/v8.tar.bz2 the directory usr/src/cmd/troff/devaps with these entries in R and S that show - is \(hy and \- has the width of +. name R hy 35 0 83 font 21 - " em 96 0 82 font 21 en 52 0 81 + 77 0 73 font 21 \- 77 0 74 font 21 name S special pl 72 0 15 + " mi 72 0 16 \- " So - is a hyphen in troff. That makes sense since it's for writing, not just man pages. -- Cheers, Ralph. https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
