[ On Thursday, July 20, 2000 at 18:01:22 (-0700), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: bin/7249 
>
> What's hackish about it?  Do you consider #include to be a hack, or a
> functional part of the preprocessor?
>
> I guess I don't understand why it is not portable -- is it one of those
> not-implemented-everywhere things, or what?

Indeed it's not portable.  I think groff was/is the only *roff to ever
implement .so internally.  (Mabye sqtroff had some support....)

Another issue is the fact that none of the troff preprocessors (eg. tbl
or eqn, etc.) implement .so meaning that you still can't always do
everything you want in any way you want even if .so is built into troff
itself.  (Geqn does have an ``include'' command, but no pre-processor
can rightly take over the '.so' directive from any other without causing
confusion at the best....)

The "soelim" program (or some more advanced macro processor) is the way
to get around both of these problems at the same time, but it's yet
another slowdown to run it for manual pages, and though it could be used
in /etc/man.conf, traditionally it isn't because nobody ever expects
manual pages to use ".so"....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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