[TUHS] man-page style

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:05:08 -0700 Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 2:40 PM Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> > Emacs sort of
> > violates my UNIX-sense as it does many things instead of doing one thing
> > well.

This is only half the story. Unix also provides a way to
assemble these tools to carry out a specific task.

> I'd argue that's not a bad thing. When people tried to add macros to make
> or sendmail, you wound up with crazy like imake or the crazy sendfile.m4
> stuff. Of course, sendmail and one thing aren't mates, but sometimes you
> need to do a few, well chosen things well to avoid the crazy that trying to
> misuse something will bring to the table.

The problem was sendmail didn't have a decent builtin glue
language to customize it. More generally, you can't just
provide domain specific objects, you have to provide a domain
specific algebra as well, so to speak. And you don't have to
provide domain specific syntax.