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

[Tom Christiansen]

>From the keyboard of brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein):
:In article <1991Jan25.080151.11595 at convex.com> tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
:> From the keyboard of brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein):
:> :Ya want other behaviors? Fine, ya get other behaviors. These all use the
:> :same strategy as the original.
:> [ many nice pipe examples that no novice will ever decipher. ]
:
:Who tf cares? Maybe you have novices maintaining your software at
:Convex, but I don't really care whether a solution is obvious or even
:comprehensible to novices. It's much more important that people be able
:to understand the interface.

How much mud can the mud-slinger sling?  How many insults can be lobbed by
this sadly disturbed individual?  Dragging in corporate affiliation like
this name is but another childish tactic, and it's not even close to
correct.  I've a much wider perspective at work here than simply where I
work.  Dan's original code had 30 quotes, 9 backslashes, and an
indirection is ugly: this in itself makes it hard to understand by almost
anyone there is.  There are a lot of UNIX users out there, and I see no
reason to make it harder than it needs to be.  I've taught UNIX to 
maybe a thousand new users in the last 5 years, and this is the kind
of stuff that turns them off.

:> :> But Tom's solution can easily be changed to have either behavior.
:> :So what? So can any reasonable solution.
:> And your solution, Dan, has not yet been proven to be such.
:
:Huh? Non sequitur. What does program proving have to do with whether a
:program can be changed to give a different behavior?

Your approach has not been proven to be a reasonable solution.  It's
obfuscated.  You're expressing an alternate algorithm to solve a problem.
It's failing lies in its obfuscation. It doesn't have to be that way.
You can write this in many languages in a much more straightforward
way.  But you want 30 quotes in this.

:> Leave the
:> programming langauge at sh if it will eliminate an irrevlant complaint of
:> yours.
:
:Huh? Wtf is irrevlant? Can anyone understand that sentence?

It means irrelevant, Dan.  Doesn't seem to me like a hard typo to
pattern-match out something that makes sense.  But maybe your gifts
lie in other directions, like senseless attacks.

--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>)