Disgusting Kernel Hack

[Boyd Roberts]

    >	I think that it is incredibly useful.  And I think that
    >	pagination is something that it is justifiable to put into
    >	the kernel, simply because the number of times you do not
    >	want something paginated is so rare that it is silly to have
    >	to run every command that has more output than you expected
    >	*twice* -- once to discover that it is long and once to pipe
    >	it through something so that you can get all the
    >	information.  

I seem to use the "shell" a *lot* too, in fact more often than not.
Gee, I think I'll hack it into the kernel.

    >	Hacking every shell seems as good evidence as any that this
    >	thing should have been in the kernel in the first place...but
    >	as an option.

Well I can't think why the "shell" wasn't part of the kernel
from the start (it could have even been an *option*).  Maybe it's
got something to do with providing a small, powerful set of
primitives with which to build on.

The trend now seems to be towards a interesting power set of 
high level, unusable pieces of gore typified by the "vhanghup"
style of:

	"We couldn't think how to do it right, so
	 we wrote a few more system calls."

This crap about "well, we do it a lot, so lets do it all the time"
makes me want to puke.  What happens when you really don't want to
do it?  Invariably with that style you wind up not being able to do
the simple things, when you really need to.

UNIX gives a good base with which to build on.  If you want the
"power set" or the "interesting options" use VMS.  The fact that
UNIX's source code is available, small, simple and written in
a portable high level language (the very things that make UNIX)
may well spell it's downfall, courtesy of the people from Berkeley
and their ilk.

Just stick to elegance, simplicity and UNIX.  If you want gore
boot VMS, although "...| more" could be interesting.


--
>From the Schooner Glass of Boyd Roberts.

decvax!mulga!boyd:basservax