At 21:19 2002-09-30 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: >[...]And in places where guesswork *can* be replaced with markup, I'm not >sure I'd object to doing that (for example, only marking up man page >references like foo(1) when they're written as L<foo(1)>). But last I >heard, Tom utterly hated that idea.[...]
Whenever I am told of some utter notion that Tom has (or "had", considering that the Perl world is apparently free of him forever), I always think of something Lytton Strachey said about Samuel Johnson: "Johnson's aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle or solid or bold; they always have some good quality to recommend them, except one: they are never right." I think the only open question is whether Tom's ideas benefit from the "even a broken clock is right twice a day" principle, or whether a broken record is the more appropriate metaphoric mechanism. But anyway, I sense that I'm missing something here, because of my almost complete lack of familiarity with *roff: It it merely a cosmetic thing whether a Pod formatter leaves an unadorned "foo(1)" as is, or puts it in an appropriate style for a man cross-reference? Or are there grander non-cosmetic ramifications? -- Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
