Tzafrir Cohen
Mon, 17 Sep 2001 01:12:41 -0700
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Mon, Sep 17, 2001, mulix wrote about "Re: using unix page: early draft": > > in contrast, i dont mind the technion teaching csh. it's a useful tool. > > No it isn't. It's as a useful tool as a worn-out screwdriver: when you go > out to the outside world, once in a while you'll need to use a screwdriver > that has been worn-out, and you'll need to settle with it. But it's no reason > to learn only about worn-out screwdrivers. Usually you have the choice, and you > need to know how a good screwdriver looks like, where to get one, and how to > use it, and not go into a hardware store saying "I get confused with all > those brand-new screwdrivers - we didn't have those when I was studying. Do > you have some crappy worn-out one?". Nadav: keep in mind that csh is not _that_ different from bourne shell. Syntacticaly, both can run as scripts (although in this course they don't explain what does the '#!'does), and both use very similar syntax for comments and variables, and (o., that's where te syntactic similarity ends) But both imply very similar methods: the syntax of each shell is not rich enough to do the actual processing, and the actual processing has to be done by other simple tools (the same set of tools for csh and bourne shell). So if you know csh, learning bourne shell isn't that difficult. You hopefully know how to look in different man pages and have some ideas on what tools to use. Given the "lazyness factor" (changing the sylabus requires changing the available materials, writing exam questions from scratch, students bitching about the booklet of last year not good for this year, students bitching about no bash questions in the exams booklet, staff doesn't know bourne shell ;-)) it would take a better reason than that to change the course material. -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]