On Fri, 1 Oct 1999 12:58:15 -0600 in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bruce Guenter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It also goes against "the UNIX way" -- each task does one small and
> easily definable task. Why else have programs like "sort" or "uniq"?
> Why not build those into "ls" as well? Oh, and "cat". Oh, and "more".
> What DJB has done is to build a set of programs that each do a single
> task -- svscan handles starting a series of supervise tasks; supervise
> handles (re)starting and stoping a single task; tcpserver handles
> incoming connections; qmail-smtpd handles ths SMTP protocol; and so on.
This is by contrast with "the Multics way", which is to build powerful
subroutines (programs not intended to be called except by other programs)
to do things like date conversions, sorting, pattern matching, argument
processing, file manipulation, etc., so that any given command can easily
be as powerful as necessary, and be completely consistent with all other
commands in its interface. Perl developers often seem to have a fairly
similar philosophy. See http://www.best.com/~thvv/multics.html
Jim Lippard [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.discord.org/
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