Re: CVS commit: src/share/man/man9

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 05:17:31AM +0300, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> Would you seriously insist that we should discard existing behaviour
> that is consistent and practical and introduce (i.e. hack mdoc troff
> macros) artificial variable-width-last-column marker to -column
> arguments with the sole purpose of the exercise being that the number
> of arguments to -column be equal to the number of columns?

Knowing in advance the number of columns is important if you want to do
proper markup for anything not tab-bound. E.g. if you want to create
proper (X)HTML with colgroups header it is now a two-pass process, one
to compute the number of columns in each row (puking if not consistent)
and another just to output. Given to how many great length nroff does to
allow single pass processing for other parts, this is obnoxious.

Joerg