UNIX Futures

[gwyn at brl-smoke.UUCP]

In article <168 at desint.UUCP> geoff at desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) writes:
>In article <1199 at ulysses.UUCP> ggs at ulysses.UUCP (Griff Smith) writes:
>
>> It's also nice to be able to stop things some times...
>> I also like having the
>> option of stopping a suspected run-away process instead of blowing it
>> out of the water.  Would you drive a car without brakes?
>
>The reason Dennis Ritchie qualifies as a genius is because when we say
>"it sure would be nice to..." to him, he responds "yup, sure would"
>instead of "hey, yeah, I'll go hack it in."

I suspect there are other reasons, but this one is indicative.

>DISCLAIMER:  I've never met DMR;  I'm just making a point here.  Read his
>paper on streams to hear in his own words how incredibly hard it is to
>come up with a simple unifying concept instead of a bunch of hacks like BSD.

A relevant observation here is that 8th Edition UNIX does have nice
process control support, but it doesn't look at all like Berkeley's
"job control" implementation.  One wonders whether AT&T was smart
enough to pick up /dev/proc etc. for inclusion in SVR3.

Once one has the 8th Ed. process control hooks, one can implement
terrific software such as the Process Inspector "pi" (also called
the "transcendental" debugger, groan).  The closest thing we (the
public) have to "pi" at present is "dmdebug" (nee "joff"), which
works only on DMD (Teletype 5620) downloaded processes.  It's
pretty spiffy!  (Beats the heck out of "dbx" and BSD job control.)