Re: [TUHS] [patch] do not strip mdoc macros - TUHS

15 Mar 2019

...
   But sed, awk,
perl, python, ... lex and parse once into an AST or
 bytecode, removing the recurring cost of comments, etc. that impact
 groff.  So I don't think it's an even comparison.  
 Of course it's a valid comparison.  Which sed or awk or shell script is
 distributed in a stripped/compressed form?  Do they store their AST
 somewhere, so as to avoid recompilation?  They do not.  Just as
 with groff, every parse starts anew. 
Comments inside of a macro definition get scanned each time it's called.
This justifies the first paragraph above.

In the wild, almost all comments occur outside macro definitions.
This justifies the second.

Thus comments are harmless in practice.

Doug