Altos XENIX/SCO XENIX

[Chet Ramey]

[Mark Horton says:]

>>Sounds like the -v (verbose) option I added to the 4.0BSD wc command.
>>(It's not in 4.3BSD's wc, Rob Pike made them take it out.)

and Bill Wisner <wisner at cis.ohio-state.edu> then asks:

>Why?

[If indeed it was Rob Pike who "made them take it out"]

Rob Pike's views concerning `unnecessary' (`frivolous'? :-) options to Unix
commands are well known (cf.  "cat -v Considered Harmful" (Toronto Usenix,
1983), "The Unix Programming Environment" (IEEE Computer, around 1984, as
well as the book of the same name), and an article along the same lines in
the second BSTJ Unix issue in '84). 

He is one of the more vocal `Unix minimalists', and has stated more than
once that adding options to an existing program that result in `new
behavior' runs counter to the Unix philosophy and should be stamped out
(well, that's probably a little strong, but you get the idea).  (For
example, cat making funny characters visible with -v is at odds with its
original purpose, concatenating files.  He has used the BSD ls columnation
of its file lists as another example of this.)  The alternative he has
espoused is more small tools that do one specific task (as an example:
the implementation of `vis' in "The Unix Programming Environment" to do
the job of `cat -v').

I would guess that he thought wc's `-v' option was sufficiently removed from 
wc's original purpose to be undesirable.  (Mark, how much did it increase
code size?)

I should say that I am not attempting to attribute opinions to Rob that 
he may not hold; these are merely my interpretations of some of the material
he has written.

Chet Ramey			"His efforts in support of this worthy cause
Network Management Group	 were warmly applauded by the doctors; several
Case Western Reserve University	 nurses also gave him the clap." 
chet@{cwjcc,pirate}.CWRU.EDU			--  "Weekend Warriors"




Chet Ramey			"His efforts in support of this worthy cause
Network Management Group	 were warmly applauded by the doctors; several
Case Western Reserve University	 nurses also gave him the clap." 
chet@{cwjcc,pirate}.CWRU.EDU			--  "Weekend Warriors"