weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Ol' Doc Weemba) (10/19/86)
Expires: References: Sender: Followup-To: Somebody told me there were some real silly flames going on in this group, and by gosh, there were. They are inspiring, in a negative sort of way, though, so I thought I'd tell you about a certain very bright mathematician around these here parts. The following is a true story. I'm not joshin' you folks. Smedley (not his real name) is fluent in several languages. Not computer languages--he doesn't even know BASIC. Like I said, he's real bright, but he's got other things to do. Like mathematics. Or learn Chinese linguistics or how to count in Eskimo. He writes his papers in troff using vi. I should point out when I say troff, I mean troff. He don't touch eqn or tbl--they don't come out right, so he works with the naked stuff. Of course, he knows and uses every damned feature of vi in the book. He keeps running into vi bugs all the time--some of them quite out of the way--and some as simple as 5^B. (Amazing thing about that last bug. I always typed ^B^B^B etc. til I got to where I was going. But Smedley had to get there by binary search. The guy's an up an' comer, now ain't he?) Anyway, he's got aliases galore. He loves aliases and macros. And that's how he programs at the shell level too. Alias after alias. It's amazing. Not even a two or three line shell script in his work. Have you ever escaped your escape for the escape for the escape for a little diddly quotation mark that had to survive multiple multiple interpretations down the line? Be honest now. Smedley does it all the time. He even has abbreviations for different levels of quoting squirrelled away for later. Well, enough of this preramble. Smedley once sent out a simple alias on our local math messages, to extract a consecutive block of lines from a file. A trivial tail into head pipeline. So I told him that sed would do a cleaner job, and this interested him. "Sed? What's that?" Well, I had to explain about the stream editor, and how it's just like ex, without the chance to go back, and not too hard to use once you get past the initial appearances. You have to realize, I didn't really care about his little alias, but damned if it ain't galling to see people be so damned inefficient all the time. Yup, I thought Smedley would get a kick out of learning sed. And so he did. Next day he had the tower of hanoi up and running in a recursive sed script. Dangedest thing I ever did saw. Yup, we all know it's SOP for emacs, but somehow it just ain't the same thing. And this from a man who hadn't ever written a "Hello World" program in his life. I don't know if this story has got a moral or not, but really fellas, real programmers will edit on a card punch if need be. And as for Smedley, well, some day I'm going to learn ol' Smedley some awk. It might even come in handy. Ol' Doc Weemba ucbvax!brahms!weemba PS-While I still have your eyeballs, I thought you might be interested in a little bit of trivia Smedley once told me. It seems that, ain't this a riot, according to the Greek Orthodox Church calender, the year 2900 is going to be a leap year after all.