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000045_fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu_Wed Oct 17 20:07:46 EDT 2001.msg
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Article: 12857 of comp.protocols.kermit.misc
Path: newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu!watsun.cc.columbia.edu!fdc
From: fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Frank da Cruz)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.kermit.misc
Subject: Re: Dumb question about man pages
Date: 18 Oct 2001 00:08:10 GMT
Organization: Columbia University
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In article <ur8s17s7a.fsf@worldnet.att.net>,
Thomas A. Horsley <Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
: >Or of a way to produce a UNIX man page and an HTML document from
: >common (plain-text) source?
:
: Perl (www.perl.com is a good starting place) uses a format it calls POD
: (plain old documentation) and has converters from POD to hmtl, man pages,
: and many other formats (I personally hate POD, but some people love it).
:
I was hoping for something simpler like maybe a secret option in Lynx to
dump a web page as nroff. Believe it or not I haven't had time to deal much
with Perl yet... Btw another option that I know of already, but is also not
exactly clean or simple, is Scribe (who remembers Scribe? -- it was kind of
a precursor to TeX), in which Scribe source can be output as PostScript,
various other typesetter formats, plain ASCII, nroff, and HTML. And (since
you mentioned it) POD format, but not the one you're thinking of. Scribe's
POD stands for Prince Of Darkness, perfect for the Diablo daisy-wheel
printer on which it is printed :-)
: Speaking of perl, if you really want to provide a useful kermit extension,
: provide an add-on perl XS module for talking kermit, or embed perl in kermit
: as an alternative scripting language. (Not that I believe it will happen,
: but you can always ask :-).
:
Actually I think Kermit is pretty useful the way it is. What could you do
with a Perl extension to Kermit that you can't do already without one?
Of course I have nothing against Perl, but (a) the to-do list for Kermit
stretches on into infinity; (b) I hate it when people say "why did those
Kermit nuts invent a whole new whacky scripting language instead of using
Perl?" (or Python, etc, name your favorite one) because, ahem, Kermit came
first! and (c) without actually looking into it to make sure, I suspect that
Kermit is *still* more portable than Perl. The same things (and more) can
be said of Expect and the many others that people suggest as alternatives to
the venerable Kermit language :-)
Anyway, it's just a man page -- a one-shot deal, and probably just as easy
to do in EMACS by hand (and macro) than any other way.
- Frank
P.S. A good way to get stuff added to Kermit is to write the code yourself
and send it in, like everybody did in the old days.