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From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Computers for users not programmers
Summary: Confusion between hardware, systems, and programs
Message-ID: <5038@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 2 Feb 91 14:51:10 GMT
References: <409@bria> <13252@lanl.gov> <3169@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
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In article <3169@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>, davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) writes:
> In article <13252@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
> 
> | What?  NONE of the UNIX tools do anything _NEW_.  They are just poorly
> | designed and hard to use versions of utilities that every system I've
> | ever seen has versions of.  
> 
>   That's great! We've been spending thousands of dollars to gt unix
> tools for other systems, and all this time they were right there.
> 
>   So what programs under MS-DOS, AmigaDOS, MaxIntosh, VMS, AOS, CMS and
> JPL correspond to awk, sed, yacc, diff, and grep? Other than VMS, which
> has a diff which produces an output which is only human readable, and a
> search command which lacks powerful pattern matching, the capabilities
> seem... well *missing* is the first word which comes to mind.

What do these tools have to do with the UNIX operating system?  Possibly
there are some legal restrictions in some cases, but I believe most of
these are public domain.  At most, interfaces would have to be rewritten.

The hardware provides the capabilities.  As far as possible, software
should allow the user access to these capabilities.  Except for security
restrictions, and possibly some restrictions to prevent physical damage
to the machine, software should allow whatever hardware allows, instead
of restricting it.

As far as grep is concerned, the only UNIX part in the interface is handling
file access and the ability to display file names.  I agree that any 
operating system needs this, and the more flexible the better.  This
means reading directories, and the possibility of accessing files only
found by reading directories.  That is part of the operating system.
Getting line numbers, etc., is not.

The hardware manubacturers should help the users use the hardware; the
systems designers should make the systems flexible so that tools can be
easily inserted or replaced, and the tool designers should make the tools
so that they do not restrict the users.  To much to great an extent, all 
of these are being violated to a very great extent.

--
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)   {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)