wcs) (05/08/91)
]In article <19227@rpp386.cactus.org>, jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes: ]>UNIX, at least "real UNIX", is not a "hack". It was a very cohesive ]>system, well thought out and thoroughly understood by its implementors. UNIX is a collection of lots of things - there IS a well-thought-out set of primitives, and a lot of emphasis on making maximal use of existing features rather than adding new ones, but, face it, there's a lot of random hackery in there. For instance, look at the disarray in command-line arguments, even since the appearance of getopt() more than 10 years ago. Even simple-minded things like ALWAYS accepting a file name on the command-line in addition to filtering stdin aren't consistent. It's not just that some things need fancier semantics, or that you'd lose compatibility - there are a lot of commands that WOULD have been upward-compatible that never were re-written, and many newer commands still don't use it. I suspect that even John won't argue that vi is a hack :-) And look at how ptys and ttys and sockets and files and pipes and streams pipes are all subtlely different - hopefully this will improve somewhat with increasing streams use in SVR4. One of the blessings, and curses, of UNIX is that it's very easy to write a program to do just what you want, and a lot of people did. In article <1991Apr23.123159.23267@cs.utk.edu> Dave Sill <de5@ornl.gov> writes: ] ]>Stallman I can't speak for, but given the grotesque thing called "emacs", ]>yes, Stallman is a hacker, and it isn't something to be proud of. It Well, Stallman plus cast of thousands, more precisely. ]>would be possible to implement "emacs" in far less memory, but of course ]>it wouldn't be a programming language and a desert topping. ]Then it wouldn't be Emacs, John. Like it not, some people *like* Emacs, ]and have the resources to run it. The existence of smaller, differently- ]abled (aka handicapped :-) editors doesn't automatically make Emacs "bad". The original emacs DID live in much less memory, though the machine was big for its day, and it has ALWAYS had a programming language as part of it (though the early versions were teco rather than lisp). And you could make dessert toppings in emacs back then as well. ]>Emacs is provably no more powerful than vi in it's programming abilities, yet ]>it consumes vastly more resources. This is something clearly to be proud ] "Power" is a fairly useless measure of the merit of a program when ] other factors such as ease of use, portability, robustness,.... Well, you CAN simulate a Turing machine in vi (subject to resource limitations), but it gets much slower than emacs when you do :-) And you CAN get small, clean emacsen which retain the main character of emacs without being as big as GNU. But GNU emacs does have a lot of useful things included in it, and once you start editing N files at a time, using X Windows or even just letting emacs manage the screen, you'll find that N instantiations of vi + more + Mail get pretty piggy as well. Emacs takes a (relatively) clean approach to reality, and lets you build lots of tools on its platform; each tool can be relatively small and manageable, though this is certainly not enforced. I still normally use vi, but it's nice being able to edit a file bigger than 300K (stupid limit in distributed System V versions, left over from pre-virtual-memory days) - if this were emacs, I could fix it. -- Pray for peace; Bill # Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 erebus.att.com!wcs AT&T Bell Labs 4M-312 Holmdel NJ # I never wanted to be a hacker! I wanted to be --- a lumberjack!