>Wouldn't at least gcc be from the MIT culture given its originator was >from the mit ai lab? Where's readline and info from originally? >Not to mention emacs. > >Where did the --option syntax originate? Maybe they wanted to say /option >but that's not possible under Unix. Wouldn't the -o vs --very-long-option-name >count as a MH vs. MIT artifact? > >These are real questions. I would like to know.
Emacs and Info clearly originated on MIT's "ITS" operating system, and were originally written by Richard Stallman, as was today's widely used GNU Emacs. GCC had its roots in a "portable optimizer" paper written by someone at Arizona (I think), but GCC itself was coded in a heavily Lisp-influenced style, again by Richard Stallman. The --option syntax is also due (as far as I know) to Stallman and resulted from a search for ways to add long-named options to existing Unix programs without breaking POSIX 1003.2 compatibility. Stallman originally tried to use +option, but found that was directly incompatible with POSIX, which pretty much says that anything not beginning with - is a regular argument. POSIX had inherited the old System V getopt() convention that "--" ends the list of options, and never specifically said what "--stuff" means, so Stallman stole it for long-named options.
