Hi Kurt, At 2026-09-08T23:36:33-0400, T. Kurt Bond wrote: > On Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:24:55 -0400, > "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> wrote: > > As I have said before,[2] "groff -a" does what "deroff" and "unroff" > > programs do, does it better, and is very close to what users of such > > tools want anyway. > > Does unroff here refer to the unroff built using ELK Scheme?
Yes. That's the only "unroff" I've ever heard of, whereas there appear to be multiple "deroff"s, though maybe all or most of them are descended from DWB's version. Or, like "man2html", it was an idea a whole hell of a lot of people had, none of whom appreciated the fundamental difficulty of what they were attempting. > Back in the day I found it quite useful to convert troff documents to > HTML. It got around the programmable nature of the troff language by > allowing you to extend unroff with Scheme code that would be > associated with macros, etc. so you could program the appropriate > actions to take when they were encountered. Conceded, but at that point you're writing a *roff interpreter in Scheme. A partial one, with boundaries the author (ideally) must understand, document, test, and communicate to users. This is essentially what mandoc(1) does, albeit in C. > (Last time I tried to build ELK Scheme and Unroff on Linux the unroff > didn't work at all, and ELK Scheme had some problems. A pitty.) Aww, man. I notice there's a thing called "tinyscheme". And it _is_ small: $ size /usr/bin/tinyscheme text data bss dec hex filename 85730 7592 80 93402 16cda /usr/bin/tinyscheme We can't forget this part: $ ls -hs /usr/lib/tinyscheme/init.scm 24K /usr/lib/tinyscheme/init.scm I wonder if the Guix project has evaluated TinyScheme for their bootstrapping procedure. ...though if somebody threw me the task with no guardrails, I'd probably bootstrap a bare metal machine with a tower of Forths, progressing from something like Sergeant's "three instruction Forth"[1] up to an ANS Forth. Interestingly to me, GNU Forth is only about twice the size of TinyScheme (not counting documentation and Elisp crutches for GNU Emacs users). I also want OpenFirmware to live again and displace UEFI. I'll keep dreaming. ;-) Regards, Branden [1] https://pygmy.utoh.org/3ins4th.html
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