instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases (absurdly long)

[David Herron, NPR Lover]

In article <5852 at utzoo.UUCP> henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> 	Why is "cat -v" a botch?  If you want to see if you have junk in a
>> file it's a lot nicer than "od -c".  And what's so terrible about "ls -C"?
 ...
>For an explanation of why "one program, one function, done well" is a good
>way to build a system, see almost any discussion of the "Unix philosophy".
>Try Kernighan & Pike.

er .... read the earlier book "Software Tools".

They talk all about the "One program, one function, done well" philosophy.
It's very good.  Very nice.  Very reasonable.  I go along with it completely.

But they say one other thing.  "When you have functions which are commonly
done together then why not put them into one program."

For instance.  sort(1) didn't always do the function of uniq.  But now
it does because they were commonly done together.

But ... you have to judge each case carefully.

In the case of cat -v, it really does produce more readable output.  At
least for some cases.  But it's output isn't very usable (You can't convert
it back into the input file for instance).  With od -c you COULD write
a program to convert the output back into the input.  It really depends
what you are wanting to do with the output.

In the case of ls -C, you have some qualitative gains.  ls -C is able to
optimise the formatting.  And it IS a lot more useful than having
to type the ls | mc string.

On the other hand, it's signs of "creeping featurism", a particularly
nasty form of cancer which spawns such monstrosities as EMACS and VMS
and the like.

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-- 
--- David Herron
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