Re: [groff] [patch] do not strip mdoc macros

[James K. Lowden]

On Fri, 15 Mar 2019 16:03:28 +0000
Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote:

> > 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. 
> 
> It seems you're not aware that groff runs the source.  It doesn't have
> an intermediate representation like those other commands I listed.
> Thus every invocation of a macro, or iteration around a loop, reads
> each character anew.

You seem to be saying there's some significance to groff's internal
representation, or lack thereof.  Why?  I doubt it makes any measurable
difference.  Parsing likely dominates performance in languages that
execute relatively few loops.  

If I'm wrong, and the lack of an internal efficient representation is
actually a dramatic drag on performance, then surely the solution lies
not in compressing macro sources, but in improving the software, so
that the benefit accrues to all, compressed and not.  

--jkl