Re: string comparison bug in pic

Hi folks,

Doug originally sent this to me privately, but I'm forwarding it to the
list with his permission.

I concur with his economically articulated general principle.

----- Forwarded message from Douglas McIlroy <[email protected]> -----

Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2026 21:33:29 -0500
From: Douglas McIlroy <[email protected]>
To: "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <CAKH6PiVTb1Sgoze7G66UUsw2c7-7b3t1mFK6FZfVxM7nWv+K0g@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: string comparison bug in pic

> Our pic(1) man page documents "print" as a GNU extension

print expr was in the original pic, but expressions were numeric and
did not include relational operators, Gnu added many operators and
allowed multiple expressions. I agree with your guess that the grammar
was not adjusted sufficiently.

One  insufficient adjustment  is that more than one argument is
allowed but not less.. On general principles, if there's an obvious
limiting behavior as n goes to zero, it should be allowed, regardless
of what one thinks of its utility. In the case of print, the behavior
should be to print an empty line.

Doug

----- End forwarded message -----

Regards,
Branden

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