The most surprising Unix programs
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The most surprising Unix programs
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Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#2Hadn't heard of most of these.
The peoples' names were more recognizable.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#3> struct - Brenda Baker undertook her Fortan-to-Ratfor converter against the advice of her department head--me. I thought it would likely produce an ad hoc reordering of the orginal, freed of statement numbers, but otherwise no more readable than a properly indented Fortran program. Brenda proved me wrong. She discovered that every Fortran program has a canonically structured form. Programmers preferred the canonicalized form to what they had originally written.
We could've had prettier et al instead of style linters 40(+?) years ago. :(
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#4> struct - Brenda Baker undertook her Fortan-to-Ratfor converter against the advice of her department head--me. I thought it would likely produce an ad hoc reordering of the orginal, freed of statement numbers, but otherwise no more readable than a properly indented Fortran program. Brenda proved me wrong. She discovered that every Fortran program has a canonically structured form. Programmers preferred the canonical…
I had to look up ‘Ratfor’ because I’d never heard of it — apparently it’s a FORTRAN preprocessor that added control structures.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#5What's surprising about eqn, dc, and egrep? I'm using the latter two all the time, and have used eqn (+troff/groff and even tbl and pic) in the 1990's for manuals and as late as (early) 2000's to typeset math-heavy course material. Not nearly as feature-rich as TeX/LaTeX, but much more approachable for casual math, with DSLs for typesetting equations, tables, and diagrams/graphs. I was delighted to see that GNU had a full suite of roff/troff drop-in replacements (which I later learned was implemented by James Clark, of SGML and, recently, Ballerina fame).
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#6What's surprising about eqn, dc, and egrep? I'm using the latter two all the time, and have used eqn (+troff/groff and even tbl and pic) in the 1990's for manuals and as late as (early) 2000's to typeset math-heavy course material. Not nearly as feature-rich as TeX/LaTeX, but much more approachable for casual math, with DSLs for typesetting equations, tables, and diagrams/graphs. I was delighted to see that GNU had a…
The algorithms behind them.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#7And people say theoretical computer science isn’t useful in “the real world”…
I am curious about this one, though, has anyone used it?
> The syntax diagnostics from the compiler made by Sue Graham's group at Berkeley were the mmost helpful I have ever seen--and they were generated automatically. At a syntax error the compiler would suggest a token that could be inserted that would allow parsing to proceed further. No attempt was made to explain what was wrong.
On the surface it sounds a lot like it would produce error messages like “expected ‘;’” that most beginner programmers come to hate: was it any better than this, or was that the extent of its intelligence and everything else at the time was even worse?
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#8I would add bc to the list, very useful to make occasional calculations from command line using "human readable" syntax.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#9The fact that dc does (or at least tries to) guarantee error bounds on the result is news to me.
And if that does indeed work, that's pretty cool.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#10I would add bc to the list, very useful to make occasional calculations from command line using "human readable" syntax.
Fun fact, the first version of bc was just a frontend to dc. It converted the structured input to dc's stack-based form and let dc do the math.