[TUHS] [groff] [UTROFF] references, summary, index

[George Michaelson]

In email. We used to talk about how many nested >>> it made sense to
need in a conversation. fmt was usually cited as the arbiter, because
you had to give it args to get outside of its limits, which meant you
were staring down the barrel of 6-8 >>>>>>>> deep nests for a naieve
user.

I think, it even came up as a beer conversation of the rule-of-seven.

on FreeBSD, its around 64/65 by default. Also MacOSX. Thats a 10+ deep
nested conversation of he-said-she-said-they-said-we-all-said

mind you, we also argued about top posting. which I am doing. So there.

-G

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 10:45 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> Ralph,
>
>> > On unjustified text, fmt (which uses an algorithm purported to be like
>> > Knuth-Plass)
>>
>> I wonder if that accounts for modern, coreutils 8.28-1, fmt's weirdness
>> that I've seen for a while but never got around to investigating?
>>
>>     $ yes x | fmt | awk '{print length, $0}' | uniq -c | sed 5q
>
> You threw it something of a curve ball--an infinite paragraph.
> At some point I suppose it chokes, and tries its best to make
> a semiparagraph of equal-length lines. (Since the real paragraph
> is not yet complete, it would be wrong to make the last line of
> the semiparagraph short.)
>
> Equilibrating apparently led to the split between 69- and 71-letter lines.
> Whether the alternation of 11 of one and 16 of the other is an infinite
> pattern or a subpattern is not clear. It could be part of a continued-fraction
> approximation, related to the staircse appearance of a bitmap "straight line".
>
> Doug