On 3 May 2017 at 09:09, Arthur Krewat <krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote:
> Not to mention, you can cat multiple files - as in concatenate :)
Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."
N.
> I believe I was the last person to modify the Linux man page macros.
> Their current maintainer is not the kind of groff expert to whom it
> would occur to modify them; it would work as well to ask me questions
Question #1. Which tmac file to they use? If it's not in the groff
package, where can it be found?
Doug
OK, I recall a note dmr wrote probably in the late 70s/early 80s when folks
at UCB had (iirc) extended the symbol name size in C programs to
essentially unlimited. This followed on (iirc) file names going beyond 14
characters.
The rough outline was that dmr was calling out the revisions for being too
general, and the phrase "BSD sins" sticks in my head (sins as a verb).
I'm reminded of this by something that happened with some interns recently,
as they wanted to make something immensely complex to cover a case that
basically never happened. I was trying to point out that you can go
overboard on that sort of thing, and it would have been nice to have such a
quote handy -- anyone else remember it?
ron
There you go:
http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/
Em 2 de mai de 2017 17:29, "Diomidis Spinellis" <dds(a)aueb.gr> escreveu:
On 02/05/2017 19:11, Steve Johnson wrote:
> I recall a paper Dennis wrote (maybe more like a note) that was titled
> echo -c considered harmful
> (I think it was -c). It decried the tendency, now completely out of
> control, for everybody and their dog to piddle on perfectly good code
> just because it's "open".
>
There's definitely Rob Pike's talk "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered
Harmful", which he delivered at the 1983 Usenix Association Conference and
Software Tools USers Group Summer Conference. Unfortunately, I can't find
it online. It's interesting that the talk's date is now closer to the
birth of Unix than to the present.
Diomidis
