[TUHS] syscalls, records in pipe [was: Re: most direct Unix descendant]

[Tomasz Rola via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

On Sun, Jun 09, 2024 at 03:00:53AM -0500, Ed Bradford wrote:
> Excellent responses here. Brings back so many great memories.
> 
> My 1 cent would be to ask the question:
> 
>    Which of today's Unix variants (Linux, BSD, AIX, Cygwin, ...) is
>    closest to the philosophy of the Ken-Denis-Doug versions of V6 Unix?
> 
> All the variants I see today suffer from "complexification" - a John Mashey
> term.
> Documentation of commands today has grown 5 to 10 fold for each
> command in /usr/bin. V7 had less than 64 well documented
> system calls. Today's Linux, AIX, and others have how many?
> I don't know.

Well, here you are (on my more or less updated ParrotOS, a Debian
derivative) (watch for insider line break):

-$  man 2 syscalls | awk '/Sys.*Kern.*Not/,/On many plat/ {if ( $1
~ /.*\(2\)/ ) print $1;}' | sort | uniq | wc -l
468

> The concept of producing a stream of text as the output of a program
> that does simple jobs well has been replaced by "power-shell" thinking
> of passing binary objects rather than text between program - a decidedly
> non-portable idea.

I guess an analogue of this could be made - for example, when I say
'dpkg -s scm' it prints:

-$  dpkg -s scm
Package: scm
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Installed-Size: 2294
Maintainer: Debian Scheme Dream Team <debian-scheme@lists.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Version: 5f3-4
Depends: slib, libc6 (>= 2.34), libncurses6 (>= 6), libreadline8 (>=
6.0), libtinfo6 (>= 6), libx11-6
Suggests: r5rs-doc
Description: Scheme language interpreter
 SCM conforms to the R5RS (Revised^5 Report on the Algorithmic
 Language Scheme) and IEEE P1178 specifications, and is portable
 across many architectures and operating systems. It additionally
 includes a set of popular Common Lisp functions, POSIX and X Windows
 integration, and the Hobbit scheme-to-C compiler.
Homepage: https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/SCM.html

I believe the format is easy to grasp and I think there is an RFC for
this, but cannot quickly find the number.

But the cost - blowing and puffing up every and each of the sh tool.

[...]
> Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix,
> anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park.  Today, everything
> is GUI and nothing can
> be automated easily or, most of the time, not at all.
> 
> Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and
> complexity.
> 
> It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most.

When I became fascinated with Unix while a student still, I could not
find anybody else drawn to the idea of automating stuff to be done,
like Unix enabled. OTOH, I never asked people much about what they
were thinking. My impression, however, was that Windows 3.1 had
already owned their minds and whatever Unix was, it did not concerned
anybody too much. Clients used Windows, future bosses wanted
Windows. Have 500 thousands lines in a file? Read it into Excel and
massage it there. Have fifty files, each 500000 lines worth? Oy,
repeat fifty times, manually. Find an intern slaving body and automate
with him, of him, on him, however you call it.

In a way, it was and still is better than all advances of modern so
called AI - after all, interns do really care about results.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com             **