Re: [9fans] quotefmtinstall

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

> 0.  the essence of charles' point is that persistent memory is cheep, and little
> fiddly bits are expensive, from a developer's point of view.  and by
> cheep, we're talking silly cheep.  1kb of disk costs 100 nanodollars.  it's the
> order of magnitude that's important here, a small integer factor won't
> make disks expensive.
>
The digital divide, what can I say?

Sadly, I can't buy nanodollars' worth of technology, even though it is
being discarded daily in the western world by the megadollar.  Even
the RaspberryPI is beyond reach (we can approach western sponsors for
funding, but that creates a form of slavery that africans are
understandably reluctant to depend on - our leaders don't mind, but
some of us have a social conscience).

I guess I'm asking you and Charles and others to keep that in mind
when you contribute to the conspiracy to make the digital divide
bigger, no matter how small your contribution.

> 1.  it can't be optional.  this is the sort of thing that got
> latter-day unix in so much trouble.  if you want your program to
> work everywhere (as most people do) you have to program for the
> least common denominator, so every program will need
> quotefmtinstall().  so there will be a net savings of zero.  and
> since the problem will now appear on some systems, it will probablly
> be harder to remember that you've forgotten to quotefmtinstall.
>
> 2.  if you want to save overall storage, the print library should ditch
> standard support for the rune*print() functions.  only 4 programs use
> them.

I understand the technological issues more or less well enough.  But
where I stand, I can't ignore the social implications of consuming
resources as soon as they become available.  I can think of a penalty
that could be paid by inefficient consumers, but in a world where
survival of the fittest is the guiding civilising principle, I am
geographically an endangered species.

++L

PS: Your "if you want your program to work everywhere (as most people
do)" is spurious.  Why are we programming for anything but MS Windows,
if that is the case?