thanks ppl my fault for not getting far enough down the man page to see the INCOMPATIBILITES section. I didn't even envisage that there would be any. Kudos to Byron for the project at all but I would've thought that the project goal was NO incompatibilites. However now I've been enlightened to the parallel history I can see that the user base albatross flaps it's wings. Well it least I'm on the list now so I'll know about things in advance. Matt
> thanks ppl
>
> my fault for not getting far enough down the man page to see the
> INCOMPATIBILITES section. I didn't even envisage that there would be
> any.
>
> Kudos to Byron for the project at all but I would've thought that the
> project goal was NO incompatibilites.
Well, it started out that way but in 1990 plan 9 was a closed system
and I didn't see any problem with fixing some of the glaring flaws
(I think "if not" falls in that category. However, on the subject of
"if not", at this point if anyone could hack it into the grammar and
still make the current behavior of "else" work I think that would be
a good thing).
Furthermore Unix != Plan 9 so I had to take the initiative on some
matters to make the shell work properly under Unix.
That being said now that Plan 9 is more open perhaps the more
superficial incompatabilities should be normalized, if possible.
Byron.
byron@rakitzis.com writes: }That being said now that Plan 9 is more open perhaps the more }superficial incompatabilities should be normalized, if possible. FWIW, I think $^t is more logical since it conserves special chars, even if it reverses the sense of the ^ operator. (c)2001 Callum Gibson callum.gibson@db.com Global Markets IT, Deutsche Bank, Australia 61 2 9258 1620 ### The opinions in this message are mine and not Deutsche's ###
Callum Gibson wrote
> FWIW, I think $^t is more logical since it conserves special chars, even
> if it reverses the sense of the ^ operator.
I don't think it reverses the sense at all. $^ was originally intended
to mean ``repeated application of the ^ operator on a variable.''
For what it's worth, that syntax in Byron's implementation appears to
date from early 1991:
From: byron@archone.tamu.edu (Byron Rakitzis)
To: haahr@adobe.com
Subject: list flattening
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 91 17:55:45 CST
is now in as an operator. yip yip.
(I also have a drop of rc from half an hour before that message which
doesn't include $^, so we can be fairly precise about its timing.)
--p