Re: top <rant>
Re: top <rant>
- Subject: Re: top <rant>
- From: John W Baxter <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 22:17:16 -0700
At 14:32 +0100 10/5/2002, has wrote:
>
Could be... the basic unix philosophy - lots and lots of little components
>
that each do one thing well, and which can be linked together to perform
>
more complex tasks - seems jolly nice.
>
>
OTOH, the user interface itself is terse and loaded with jargon. Pls bt
>
shrt f vwls. Strong signs of C mentality there. Sounds like VMS is better
>
in that department - after all, most of these characteristics are design
>
choices, rather than inherent limitations.
Some of the Unix advantage (as stated well in the first paragraph above)
has the same roots as some of the problems (as stated well in the second
paragraph). A lot of these little programs were done by University
students either for the fun of it or for credit for a class project. (Unix
was in Universities very early by virtue of pricing differences between the
U. environment and the commercial world.) [And in retrospect, many of them
didn't know about "buffer overflow"...but then their professors probably
didn't either.]
So...my project will be a desk calculator (designed sometime in the mid 70s
to mid 80s, probably). What will I call it? Ah...desk calculator is
"dc"...that will do. What sorts of input will it accept? OK, that sounds
good. "dc - an arbitrary precision calculator" is born and modified to
what it is today. Of course, no one would ever accidentally type dc in
place of cd (that's how I found dc, back around 1995), so there's nothing
wrong with the name.
On the other hand, my project will be a spreadsheet, but fairly simple.
Let's call it "spreadsheet calculator"...or "sc". I forget how I found
that one. "sc - spreadsheet calculator". Will these two programs do
similar things similarly? Only by accident or because the sc guy borrowed
from the dc guy. I actually made use of sc for a while.
(Either of whom might have been "gal"...lets see...for sc I see two "Chris"
and one "Jay" in the huge Authors list, but no obvious and unambiguous
ladies such as "Sue" [1, 2]. For dc, the man page at hand doesn't list
authors.)
I cheated and did the above looking on our BSDi machine...Mac OS X has dc
but not sc.
--John
[1] Ignore Johnny Cash for the moment.
[2] Of course my group at NCR included a lady named "George" for a couple
of years [3], so any of the obvious guys in the list might not be.
[3] The boss had some fun with the facilities guy/gofer: he didn't tell
said gofer what sort of person the new "George" was...a pretty good
double-take resulted when she introduced herself to him.
--
--
John Baxter, Port Ludlow, WA USA
Source unknown: Remember that the ark was built by amateurs and the Titanic
was built by professionals.
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