Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!munnari.oz.au!metro!cluster!necisa!boyd From: boyd@necisa.ho.necisa.oz.au (Boyd Roberts) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: How wrong is MS-DOS? (or: Tools Tools Tools) Message-ID: <1988@necisa.ho.necisa.oz.au> Date: 14 Jan 91 02:24:29 GMT References: <11255@lanl.gov> Followup-To: alt.religion.computers Organization: NEC Information Systems Australia Pty. Ltd. Lines: 27 In article <11255@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: |From article , by egdorf@zaphod.lanl.gov (Skip Egdorf): | |> [...] The point of the Unix interface is (and was in 1975) that |> tools like grep are supposed to be seperate in order to avoid the "muscle" |> required when all those 'modes' are in EVERY program. | |The paradigm you are describing was recommended to as a way of perfomrming |what we would today call "rapid prototyping". It was a way of getting |a quick-and-dirty version of a new tool so you could play around with |the functionality before building a production quality version as a |single utility. | You wouldn't be a Emacs user would you now? The whole point of the tools approach is to do one thing well and _not_ to re-invent the wheel. How would you design a hammer? Would it start out like a hammer and the wind up being a Swiss Army Knife? Anyway, what's this got to do with computer architecture? I've set the followup to alt.religion.computers. Boyd Roberts boyd@necisa.ho.necisa.oz.au ``When the going gets wierd, the weird turn pro...''