james (02/22/83)
Would anyone care to comment on the tendency for some traditional unix software to be absolutely contrary to principles of good software design? Such as correct logic and documentation... One need only go so far as tar for example which lacks a single comment or pstat with its infamous "print system stuff", or maybe sdb. Pick your favorite example. Unix provides a good software programming environment and C is an excellent language. No doubt. I just hope that in the future there will be some effort made to aid future maintainance. This was brought on by discovering that tar tfb /dev/rawmagtape 1 and tar tbf 1 /dev/rawmagtape produce different results. Namely the first example works and the second does not work, due to the fact that the argument scanning logic decides that "nblock", the blocking factor in the second case should be zero... flame out Jim Binkley tektronix!tekmdp!dadla!dadla-b!james