[TUHS] RIP J.F.Ossanna

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 08:00:55PM +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>  |On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 07:06:51PM -0500, Ron Natalie wrote:
>  |> 1977 marks my entry into the world of UNIX.   I've always stated there was
>  |> only one person who truly understood nroff and he was dead.
>  |> I mourn the fact that of all the UNIX greats I've met, I missed out on
>  |> Ossanna.
> 
>  |I think one could argue that James Clark has a pretty good handle on
>  |roff (having written the GNU version of nroff/troff/tbl/eqn/pic etc).
> 
> And Werner Lemberg, who carried the torch for the last almost two
> decades.  He brought in some really great improvements, like
> arguments for strings, which allows to write pretty much TeX like
> a.k.a. inline if you want to (as in "this is \*[I talic] text").

Yep.  James exited stage left and Werner stepped in.  I mean no disrespect
to anyone, I was just saying that James has a really good handle on roff,
he redid it all.  I admire him for doing so (even though I curse the fact
that he did it in C++).