I'm surprised why anyone would bother with these routines
anymore, given the startling simplicity of Plan9's arg(3).
One stands in awe of such simplicity. I believe it was
William Cheswick who designed it, but I may be wrong.


On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 5:25 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> RFS vs. NFS and sockets vs. STREAMS were much more serious; they were
> about the directions Unix would take going forward, where interoperability
> (RFS/NFS) and code portability (sockets/STREAMS) were big either/or issues.
>
> Had AT&T been smarter about its licensing, both RFS and STREAMS might
> have "won", but they weren't, and those technologies have all but
> disappeared.
>
> GNU getopt can be used in a source-compatible way with POSIX getopt;
> having long options is up to the programmer.  I agree, there were
> aesthetic arguments, altough long options have mostly "won".  I'm about
> as long-time a Unix aficianado as anyone else here, and for many things
> I find long options easier to remember than short ones.
>
> (To their credit, at least initially, the GNU project asked its developers
> to use the same long options in all programs for operations that were
> the same.)
>
> Arnold
>
>
> George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:
>
> > ... and then somebody GNUified it. I seem to recall three huge
> > flamewars in UUCP days: RFS vs NFS, STREAMS (the original) vs sockets,
> > and getopt
> >
> > --no -noo --nooo=please --dont-make-me=do-that
> >
> > On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 3:54 PM,  <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> > > Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> BY the time dmr adds stdio, it was
> > >> still early enough in the life to displace the randomness for
> something as
> > >> important as I/O, whereas lack of use of something.like getopt would
> not
> > >> become clearly deficient until after widespread success.
> > >
> > > I think "widespread access" is more like it for getopt.  Getopt dates
> > > to 1980; it was in System III (I just checked). That's only about two
> years
> > > after V7 which was circa 1978.
> > >
> > > Here are the dates:
> > >
> > > -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 1073 Apr 11  1980
> usr/src/lib/libc/pdp11/gen/getopt.c
> > > -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 2273 May 16  1980 usr/src/man/man3/getopt.3c
> > >
> > > But the world outside the Bell System didn't have System III. Getopt
> > > didn't become "popular" until System V or so, and became much easier to
> > > adopt once Henry Spencer published his public domain rewrite of the
> code
> > > and man page.
> > >
> > > Just a nit, (:-)
> > >
> > > Arnold
>