Re: [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors)

[Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>]

>> After scrolling through the command list, I wondered how
>> long it was and asked to have it counted. Easy, I thought,
>> just pass it to a wc-like program. But "just pass it" and
>> "wc-like" were not givens as they are in Unix culture.
>> It took several minutes for the gurus to do it--without
>> leaving emacs, if I remember right.

> This is kind of illustrative of the '60s acid trip that
> perpetuates in programming "Everything's a string maaaaan".
> The output is seen as truth because the representation is
> for some reason too hard to get at or too hard to cascade
> through the system.

How did strings get into the discussion? Warner showed how
emacs could be expected to do the job--and more efficiently
than the Unix way, at that: (list-length (command-list-fn)).
The surprise was that this wasn't readily available.

Back then, in fact, you couldn't ask sh for its command
list. help|wc couldn't be done because help wasn't there.

Emacs had a different problem. It had a universal internal
interface--lists rather than strings--yet did not have
a way to cause this particular list to "cascade through
the system". (print(command-list-fn)) was provided, while
(command-list-fn) was hidden.

Doug