From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)
Subject: [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point [was dmr note on BSD's sins]
Date: Sat, 06 May 2017 09:30:58 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201705061330.v46DUwlH020977@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> (raw)
> tr -cs A-Za-z '\n' |
> tr A-Z a-z |
> sort |
> uniq -c |
> sort -rn |
> sed ${1}q
>
> This is real genius.
Not genius. Experience. In the Bentley/Knuth/McIlroy paper I said,
"[Old] Unix hands know instinctively how to solve this one in a jiffy."
While that is certainly true, the script was informed by my having
written "spell", which itself was an elaboration of a model
pioneered by Steve Johnson. By 1986, when BKM was published,
the lore was baked in: word-processing scripts in a similar
vein were stock in trade.
A very early exercise of this sort was Dennis Ritchie's
enumeration of anagrams in the unabridged Merriam-Webster.
Since the word list barely fit on the tiny disk of the time,
the job entailed unimaginable marshalling of resources. I
was mightily impressed then, and still am.
Doug
next reply other threads:[~2017-05-06 13:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-05-06 13:30 Doug McIlroy [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-05-05 15:20 Clem Cole
2017-05-05 15:37 ` Bakul Shah
2017-05-06 2:16 ` Noel Hunt
2017-05-06 2:40 ` Toby Thain
2017-05-06 6:07 ` Bakul Shah
2017-05-06 22:11 ` Steve Johnson
2017-05-06 23:35 ` Larry McVoy
2017-05-07 4:06 ` Dan Cross
2017-05-06 2:02 ` Doug McIlroy
2017-05-06 5:33 ` Steve Johnson
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