🚀 go-pugleaf

Tony Gozdz asks:
A related question: what other structures in troff use
the \*( prefix?  If it's only the \*(Rf/.RS/.RF
construct, would it be difficult to assign variable-length
strings to it? (just a wild guess; I'm not a programmer). 

==
\*( means gobble up exactly the next two characters
and treat it as the name of a string. Strings may be
used by any of the macros: footnotes, references,
table of contents, headers, footers, etc.
\*x, where x is *not* ( means gobble up exactly 1 char.
If string names could be more than 2 chars, about a
million troff documents would stop working, because
folks expect \(abcd to produce "string ab"cd,
not "string abcd".
The syntax was a poor choice, but it is so embedded in
the culture it can't be changed. More modern "languages"
use start and end delimiters, rather than fixed length
tokens, although this does lead to verbosity
(as in \stringname abcd \endstringname).