POSIX bashing (readline bashing)

[Curtis Yarvin]

In article <564 at bria> uunet!bria!mike writes:
>In article <70319 at brunix.UUCP> cgy at cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
>>Cooked mode is obsolete.  It was originally an efficiency hack to reduce I/O
>>processing; this has long been a marginal optimisation.  Any text interface
>>written today should use the GNU "readline" libraries, or an equivalent.
>
>They're good enough to get the job done.
>I have found that people who tend to think like Curtis (no offense intended
>to him), tend to be those people who are used to the PC-type of UNIX
>environment (consoles that sit on the bus, and a relatively small number
>of users on the system) as opposed to the good 'ol 9600 bps terminals on
>a system with 50-100 users.

Certainly.  On a 100-user mainframe, canonical mode is not a marginal
optimisation.  My point was that the good 'ol 9600 bps terminals & large
time-sharing systems are likely to pass away soon, except in heavy-duty
transaction processing environments.  Networking technology (in my opinion)
has become simple, reliable, and effective enough that a mainframe is rarely
the most cost-effective option when purchasing a new system.

>You have 50 busy people on serial terminals typing away, that non-canonical
>input combined with a memory pig is not going to be looked upon favorably,
>regardless of how many features it has.  

Typing away on what?  sh? ed?  If they're using a shell with editable
history (as most prefer), or they're editing a file, they're in raw mode.
If you have such a mongo mainframe around, and you have kmem privileges, it
might be interesting to run some tests and see exactly how much time is
spent in canonical mode.

curtis

"I tried living in the real world
 Instead of a shell
 But I was bored before I even began." - The Smiths