>> "The troff(1) typesetting formatter was, as we noted in Chapter 2,
>> Unix's original killer application."
>>
>> Oh really?
>
> Yes. troff is what runs when you say "man bash" for example.

Oh, so *that's* what that does?

So when it says "reformatting manpage", it's running troff?

I've always thought that manpages and the ugliest, lamest, most archaic 
thing ever, so I don't see that that's much of an advantage.

(On the other hand, today's reading suggests that troff is really 
designed to control phototypesetters - whatever those are - and not 
produce stuff on screen...)

>> And to think most people consider syntactic sugar to be a /good/ thing...
>
> It depends if it's useful or not. Some people put in syntax sugar just
> to make their language look like someone else's.

Well, there's syntax /sugar/, which lets you do something more easily or 
more readably, and then there's just /syntax/ for no good reason. ;-)

>> Really? The design of PostScript looks fairly UNeconomical to me.
>
> No, the *program* is economical.

So you mean it lets you do what you want done without writing too much code?

>> "Syntactically JavaScript resembles Java with some influence from
>> Perl, and features Perl-like regular expressions."
>>
>> Since when does JS have regular expressions?
>
> Since when does javascript resemble Java at all? Or, for that matter,
> have any influence from Perl?

Well, it has C-style syntax and it has objects in it. That's Java, 
right? :-P

(Then again, we all know why it's called JavaScript in the first place, 
so...)

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