Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
1–10 of 112 posts
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#2When is this from? (I presume this is a historical paper that was not influential at the time.)
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#3When is this from? (I presume this is a historical paper that was not influential at the time.)
Good question; I updated the title.
Update: oh, no room in the title. To answer your question, it's from 1987. I found it via this morning's C vs Go article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4110480)
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#4When is this from? (I presume this is a historical paper that was not influential at the time.)
Not to say that anyone should have to do this, but I did the following:
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&q=Structural+Regu...
Which yields the paper as the first result, showing its publishing year of 1987.
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#5Possibly true, but we have perl, python, ruby to deal with those cases which all embed regex in a structural way.
Occasionally you can just convert it to lines first as well and problem solved.
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#6Possibly true, but we have perl, python, ruby to deal with those cases which all embed regex in a structural way. Occasionally you can just convert it to lines first as well and problem solved.
You do realize that this paper is from early 80s and Perl, Python and Ruby did not exist, right?
As for your second statement, if you would have read the paper you would have seen why it is not the case.
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#7When is this from? (I presume this is a historical paper that was not influential at the time.)
Not to say that anyone should have to do this, but I did the following: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&q=Structural+Regu... Which yields the paper as the first result, showing its publishing year of 1987.
Not sure about the date of publication, but Rob developed these ideas in the early 80s, his Sam editor (that Ken Thompson still uses) is based on it.
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#8Nope, can't say I've needed to do any 2D pattern matching on the UNIX command line, ever. Sure back in age of dinosaurs when command line was being used for 2D graphics this may have been useful, but ... we have actual GUI interfaces to do that now.
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#9Nope, can't say I've needed to do any 2D pattern matching on the UNIX command line, ever. Sure back in age of dinosaurs when command line was being used for 2D graphics this may have been useful, but ... we have actual GUI interfaces to do that now.
Graphics? What about just grepping over more than one line of code?
Re: Rob Pike: "Current Unix tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line"
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to say that anyone should have to do this, but I did the following: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&q=Structural+Regu... Which yields the paper as the first result, showing its publishing year of 1987.
Not sure about the date of publication, but Rob developed these ideas in the early 80s, his Sam editor (that Ken Thompson still uses) is based on it.
offtopic:
sam(and acme) sounds like an interesting method at first, but when you try it out, its really weird and slow to get stuff done. Its because for me, mouse is really inferior to keyboard to do the majority of the tasks.
This is an except from coders at work:
Seibel: Is there anything you would have done differently about learning to program? Do you have any regrets about the sort of path you took or do you wish you had done anything earlier?
Thompson: Oh, sure, sure. In high school I wish I’d taken typing. I suffer from poor typing yet today, but who knew. I didn’t plan anything or do anything. I have no discipline. I did what I wanted to do next, period, all the time. If I had some foresight or planning or something, there are things, like typing, I would have done when I had the chance. I would have taken some deeper math because certainly I’ve run across things where I have to get help for math. So yeah, there are little things like that. But if I went back and had to do it over I’m sure that I just wouldn’t have it in me to do anything differently. Basically I planned nothing and I just took the next step. And if I had to do it over again, I’d just have taken the next step again.
It would be interesting to know if Ken Thompson is using sam because he is a slow typist and hence doing stuff the sam way (mouse oriented) boosts his productivity or simply because he likes using sam.