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From: roy@phri.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Large programs (and: what should be in hardware)
Message-ID: <2914@phri.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Sep-87 11:04:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: phri.2914
Posted: Tue Sep 29 11:04:48 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Oct-87 00:46:30 EDT
References: <1046@ius1.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
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Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 32
Xref: utgpu comp.unix.wizards:4269 comp.arch:2289

In article <1046@ius1.cs.cmu.edu> edw@ius1.cs.cmu.edu (Eddie Wyatt) writes:
>    Its seems very funny that they use 'ls' as an example since that
> command now is so burdened with options.  The functionality of which
> could be provided by piping the output of the command into other
> UNIX utilities. It seems that someone lost sight of the original plan.

	Once again, it seems that two comp.unix.wizards discussions have
converged to a common point.  In the one, we have people arguing about how
much exta baggage ls should have which could be done with piping through a
formatter and on the other hand we have people arguing about RISC vs. CISC
and whether to make integer divide an instruction or a subroutine.

	It's really the same argument.  You start with a simple set of tool
modules which you can plug together in various ways to do whatever you
want.  Then, you watch people for a long time and try to spot patterns in
how they plug the modules together.  If you see that almost every
invocation of "ls" is piped into "pr -4" to get multicolumn output, you
start to think it might be worthwhile to just build it into ls and save a
fork/exec every time.  Same argument for hardware divide instructions.

	Of course, what I've just described is creeping featureism, the
philosophy-non-grata of today's RISC-oriented society.  CF hit hardware
design like a ton of bricks with things like the Vax and the 68020 and the
industry (over?) reacted to the plague with Clipper, MIPS, SPARC, etc.  Are
we to see the same reaction in Unix?  Is that what GNU and Mach are all
about?  Interesting to note that SUN, while going whole-hog on software
complexity (YP, suntools, etc) also has embraced RISC as a hardware design
paradigm.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016