Tektronix emulation (was Re: X11R4 xterm on RS/6000)

[Keith Moore]

In article <273 at nlbull.Bull.NL> gerard at Bull.NL (GerardJan Vinkesteyn) writes:
>In article <1990Aug23.032925.23403 at cs.utk.edu>, moore at betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore) writes:
>> The hardware, however fast, isn't worth a lot without a decent operating 
>> system and development tools.
>> 
>> And when we point out, for instance, that the C compiler is brain damaged 
>> because its error messages can't be parsed by emacs for file name and line 
>> number, IBM suggests extensive changes to emacs's message parsing code.
>> But it's not emacs that's broken -- it's worked just fine for years with 
>> lots of other C compilers.  It doesn't take too many responses like this
>> to convince me that AIX is suffering from a severe lack of understanding
>> of UNIX design philosophy, coupled with a bit of an attitude problem.
>> 
>Thank you Keith, for your comments. I don't agree, however, with the above
>comments. More computer manufacturers deliver these kind of C compilers
>(not Bull by the way). It is a more user friendly, stricter syntax checking,
>compiler, especially for the novice user. Nothing can be against that.

I have no problem with ANSI C, strict syntax checking (as long as it can
be turned off), clear error messages, etc.
The problem (or I should say this particular problem) with the AIX 3.x 
C compiler is that its error messages do not include the file name and
line number that caused the error.    The emacs that I use (GNU emacs)
also allows you to define a regular expression that matches file name
and line number for the particular C compiler you are using, but in the
case of the AIX compiler, even this is not sufficiently flexible.

>You can shoot at IBM for their silly advertisements, still don't who that
>Gonzales guy is. But if they are good then they come up with a very decent
>Unix machine. Marketing it is another issue. 

I haven't seen their advertisments.  Only the machine.

>Perhaps CMU comes up with a nice
>BSD environment, perhaps by that time BSD is outdated because of SVr4,
>however, that is a whole different discussion all to gether. 

The point is that the Mach developers didn't fix things that didn't need
fixing.   They started with BSD, and what they came up with still looks a
lot like BSD.  I prefer a BSD environment over SV for program development, 
but if IBM had done an honest port of SVRx with ``Berkeley extensions,'' I 
wouldn't be flaming them.

Here is another example of an unnecessary change that breaks things:

rios> ls -ld ~moore
Drwxr-xr-x  45 guest    system      3072 Aug 23 10:32 /gold/homes/moore

^ What is this 'capital D' garbage?  Whatever it is, I don't want to
see it.  The file is a directory.  It's supposed to be 'd', not 'D'.
That way when I write scripts that do things like

ls -l pattern | awk '
/^d/	{ do stuff with directories }
/^l/	{ do stuff with symlinks }
...etc...' | more stuff

they will work just like they have for many years.  If you want to
extend ls to make it more useful, fine, just add an appropriate option
to enable the desired behavior AND TURN IT OFF BY DEFAULT.

Keith Moore			Internet: moore at cs.utk.edu
University of Tenn. CS Dept.	BITNET: moore at utkvx
107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus	Telephone: +1 615 974 0822
Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301	``Friends don't let friends use YP (or NIS)''