On Dec 6, 2010, at 7:19 AM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
* Peter da Silva <[email protected]> [2010-11-29 00:05]:
What wrong direction was chosen in 1969?
Leaving terminal support entirely up to userspace, via libraries?
The only worse clusterfuck that comes to mind from own experience
was printing under DOS.
In a case of premature computation gone horribly wrong, text editors
for DOS (and to this day, Windows) store text data as programs.
Rather than go the trouble of actually *running an app* to print a
document, the user is free to COPY HATE.TXT LPT1, since the purported
text file is actually a sequence of bytecode instructions for a
printer. (Such files even used to end with ^Z as a further
appeasement.)
And for this extraordinary convenience, it has only cost us negligible
trivialities, such as the assumption that \n codes a single character,
and the small requirement of writing a state machine to detect
newlines instead of a mere byte comparison. But surely, perpetually
paying the interest on this technical debt is worth having the
marvelous convenience of sending a file straight from disk to the
printer without the CPU/memory bottleneck. Even if we stopped using
it fifteen years ago.
Imagine storing a shell script as PostScript, which the shell and your
text editor (and grep, etc.) are required to parse every time they
open it, all so you can netcat it to your printer without running
enscript.
Hate,
Josh
