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* Re: [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors)
@ 2020-01-12 22:25 Doug McIlroy
  2020-01-12 22:40 ` Kevin Bowling
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2020-01-12 22:25 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

>> 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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-01-13  0:51 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 11+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-01-12 22:25 [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors) Doug McIlroy
2020-01-12 22:40 ` Kevin Bowling
2020-01-12 23:40   ` [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator [ really type-checking ] Jon Steinhart
2020-01-12 23:50     ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-13  0:01       ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-13  0:22         ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-13  0:31           ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-13  0:44         ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-13  0:35     ` Bakul Shah
2020-01-13  0:44       ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-13  0:49         ` Warren Toomey

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