17 Feb
2016
17 Feb
'16
7:55 p.m.
Hoi,
thanks for pointing to that! I would have missed it but now I had a
good laugh. :-)
part 1 image/tiff 68K
Just for the record, it's that one: https://xkcd.com/1638/
Grepped* my troff sources and found no more than four backslashes
in a row, but at least I got 16 in one line:
.ds _O '\f(SCChapter \\\\n(H1\ \ \\\\*(_C\fP''\\\\n(PN' \"
right
Seems I haven't gone deep enough into troff to need more than
four backslashes to manage my way back up into daylight. :-)
The Heirloom doctools' mm macros impress a lot more. They have
16 subsequent (!) backslashes:
$ fgrep '\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\' /usr/local/lib/doctools/tmac/*
/usr/local/lib/doctools/tmac/mmn:\!\\!.if \\$2=\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\$1 .)T 1 1
"\\*(}0" "\\$4" \\\\\\\\nP \\*(}3
/usr/local/lib/doctools/tmac/mmt:\!\\!.if \\$2=\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\$1 .)T 1 1
"\\*(}0" "\\$4" \\\\\\\\nP \\*(}3
You see, this XKCD cartoon is definitely about troff!
meillo
*) Nice thread about grep, btw.