From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Stalker To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-reply-to: <957f05d9c447adf559a1ebdb66d96449@brasstown.quanstro.net> References: <<200910070930.aa64725@salmon.maths.tcd.ie>> <957f05d9c447adf559a1ebdb66d96449@brasstown.quanstro.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <297.1254921260.1@kryten> Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 14:14:26 +0100 Message-ID: <200910071414.aa02318@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Subject: Re: [9fans] mishandling empty lists - let's fix it Topicbox-Message-UUID: 82f5a964-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > > Everything can be carried to extreme. Even ancestor worship. The > > basic utilities were written by smart people who didn't always fully > > understand what they were doing. There is nothing radical about > > suggesting that we try not to repeat their mistakes. > > well why not take your own advice and implement this. > live with it. let us know how it goes. > - erik Would you please start reading posts before replying to them? The only thing I have proposed is that people stop gratituously creating programs which treat empty lists exceptionally. If that is what you mean by the paragraph above then I do try to implement it, and am quite happy with the results. But I think you mean something else. You mean that I want to replace cat, rm, chmod etc. by programs which adhere to this principle. I've said several times that I am not going to do this and that I think it would break too many things, including most of my own shell scripts. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282