First time I hear of typo ... it's not on my standard Linux install ... where can I find the source code?
The most surprising Unix programs
11–20 of 182 posts
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#12First time I hear of typo ... it's not on my standard Linux install ... where can I find the source code?
It’s not quite the original, but Rob Pike wrote an implementation in Go: https://github.com/robpike/typo
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#13What'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when I got into Linux-based typesetting around the turn of the millennium, that was already seen as antiquated tech, superseded by LaTeX which was undergoing a frenzy of development and improvement around that time.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 stuff for the first time (and sadly even familiarity with LaTeX has waned).
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#14The author is THE Doug McIlroy. It's wonderful to learn that he's still around and spreading the good word.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#15And 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 bad message.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#16It's surprising that Doug McIlroy still reads and writes about UNIX.
For those who don't know, Dough is the guy that invented pipes.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#17It's surprising that Doug McIlroy still reads and writes about UNIX. For those who don't know, Dough is the guy that invented pipes.
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Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#18It's surprising that Doug McIlroy still reads and writes about UNIX. For those who don't know, Dough is the guy that invented pipes.
Also interesting:
> Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#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.
Re: The most surprising Unix programs
#20And 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…
The issue is that the solution to errors like these is often not adding a semicolon, but something else like “the compiler has no idea what is going on in this line” and the actual problem can range from something like an unbalanced delimiter, a misspelled keyword, or even a “syntactically valid-looking” (that a stupid parser, like a code highlighter or formatter, would approve of) but ultimately subtly illegal construct. With practice is usually becomes fairly easy to figure out where the actual error is, but it’s certainly not a very good experience for beginners. (And they’ll “come to hate it” because they’ll see it more than a few times before understanding how to deal with them.)