> actually, this is two-sided coin. Sun Studio supports > less architectures > and less languages than gcc.
I was writing about the compiler himself, not the front end 'cc'. Yes, what you write is true; but let's face it, any high-performance or system stuff will be written either in C or Fortran, what with Fortran still being king of HPC, and those are two languages that Sun Studio supports very well. > You'd probably be surprised, but it just spawns > gzip/bzip and doesn't > compress anything by itself. I'm not surprised at all; in fact, that's the way to do it (or call zlib/bzlib). > The only difference > between spawning it > manually+piping and spawning it automatically via > -j/-z is ease of use. Ease of use at the price of portability: GNU is not a standard of any kind, so a lot of UNIX systems will not have GNU tar. tar cvpf - bla blabla | <lzma|bzip2|gzip> -9c > archive.tar.<lzma|bz2|gz> will work everywhere, provided those utilities are present, and will generate a System V compliant tar archive, with correctly stored attributes (if USTAR is used), whereas not having GNU tar installed 'tar cvpz ...' will break. Portability, especially in shell scripts, is still more important than convenience, no ifs, buts, or maybes. > Stating bash is replacement for ksh and sh you > revealed quite strange > perception of reality. > bash is just a shell. There are lots of shells > around, and not all of > them are compatible, even ones trying to be. For > example, zsh is not > ksh-compatible. zsh goes above and beyond and out of his way to be as painless as possible to use for ksh and tcsh users, something bash, in utmost arrogance, does not do; even David Korn did not deviate from being compatible with Steve Bourne; there is a lesson to be learned from that, one which was obviously either not learned, or arrogantly disregarded by both the original author and the current maintainer of bash. And although the authors of zsh themselves admit that they are not POSIX compliant, which is a pity, I at least give them credit for not being arrogant in their implementation of zsh and admitting their own flaws. It commands respect, something the GNU community has no concept of, in my own view and experience. > Also, there are csh and tcsh -- are they "we know > better" replacements > for ksh too? No; csh came about the same time as ksh, and was a research effort of Bill Joy; and tcsh is that concept taken further, on to become a superset of csh. Although I'm an avid tcsh fan and daily user, I am well aware of tcsh's flaws and weaknesses, which is why most of my production scripts are written to be simple Bourne shell programs; unlike the bash creators and the GNU club, I wouldn't dream of being that arrogant to assume that there is only one shell and only one operating system - GNU/Linux. That's almost the Microsoft view on the world. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
