Multiple executables in path (Was: NON-SOURCE POSTINGS CONSIDERED HARMFUL!)

[Tom Christiansen]

The nature of my article was intended to echo Dan's: a bunch of 
childish insults (which he calls libel when I utter them) followed
by some technical talk.  Obviously, it's a wasted effort.  But
I just won't put up with insults.  I thought fire with fire might
place perspective and show why it's a bad thing.

Dan ducked most technical issues.  Let's try again.  This is probably
going to be more pearls before swine, but I'll try anyway.

It's not a matter of quoting: it's one of complexity.  The algorithm I
used, which has been demo'd in shell, perl, and even the shell from hell,
uses a straightforward decomposition of the problem.  Others have
concurred here that this approach seems more intuitive, legible, and
maintainable than Dan's.  

Maarten also pointed out that Dan's solution made mistakes.

Back to implementation language: do you really have csh on DOS, Mac's, etc?
If so, why? Aren't you just spreading the sickness?  If not, then that
solution isn't going to work even if you should have sed and tr.

Give me a list of BSD and SysV systems, Dan, on which Perl will not
compile and run.  I disblieve that there are a lot of them.  In fact, I
know of none, possibly modulo chez da Silva.

--tom
--
"Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el?  Now
 he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he
 always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen <tchrist at convex.com>)