The most surprising Unix programs

Post by tannhaeuser » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 11:08 AM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #13

tannhaeuser wrote: post #5

What'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…

I had never heard of eqn and was surprised to find that the binary is still there on my Linux box. With regard to roff in general, when I got into Linux-based typesetting around the turn of the millennium, that was already seen as antiquated tech, superseded by LaTeX which was undergoing a frenzy of development and improvement around that time. So, anyone under the age of 30 will probably be hearing of such *roff stu…

Post by DagAgren » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #19

> Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science. When part of the joy of a place is that gender doesn’t matter, it’s hard to write about that joy, because calling attention to gender is the opposite of that.

Post by m_j_g » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

saagarjha wrote: post #7

And 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…

> On the surface it sounds a lot like it would produce error messages like “expected ‘;’” that most beginner programmers come to hate Do people really come to hate these? I'd expect the opposite -- that people would start off hating messages like "expected ';'", but fairly quickly become accustomed to what they almost always mean. As long as you can look at the message and have a good idea of what's wrong, it's not a…

Post by msla » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 11:33 AM UTC

qubex wrote: post #4

morelisp wrote: post #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 canonical…

I had to look up ‘Ratfor’ because I’d never heard of it — apparently it’s a FORTRAN preprocessor that added control structures.

    if (a > b) {
      max = a
    } else {
      max = b
    }

      IF(.NOT.(A.GT.B))GOTO 1
      MAX = A
      GOTO 2
    1 CONTINUE
      MAX = B
    2 CONTINUE

      IF (A .GT. B) THEN
        MAX = A
      ELSE
        MAX = B
      ENDIF

Post by tangue » Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 11:47 AM UTC