Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!yale!leichter
From: leichter@CS.YALE.EDU (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU))
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: grep vs. SEARCH (Was Re: Software Development Tools)
Message-ID: <58080@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 23 Apr 89 14:57:04 GMT
Sender: root@yale.UUCP
Organization: Yale Computer Science Department, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Lines: 35
X-from: leichter@CS.YALE.EDU (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU))

The thing that is so silly about this debate is that it misses the obvious
answer:  When I want to search for simple text strings on VMS, I use SEARCH;
it's fast and has some nice features (like marking the found string in reverse
video and displaying some context around it if I want that).  When I want to
search for regular expressions, I use grep.  What, grep on a VMS system?
Sure; I've had it on every VMS system I've used since V2.3 or so, and before
that I used it on RSTS and RSX systems.

No, it doesn't happen to come with any of the OS tapes.  But it's available
for a trivial amount - often for nothing - from a variety of sources.  There
are several grep's available from DECUS, plus it's generally easy to port any
of the fancy ones you see distributed for Unix systems.

It happens that grep was written by the original Unix developers and has been
"part of the OS" for a long time.  Many other things on the Unix tapes were
contributed by random hackers over the years.  Because Unix was for years an
academic toy, it was no big deal to dump a bunch of stuff on the tape with
essentially the comment "Use it if you like it, if it doesn't work - that's
your problem".  You can't get away with that if you are selling a commercial
OS - which these days Unix is as much as VMS is.

People's views change very slowly.  For some reason, anything ever stuck on
any Unix tape anywhere is "part of Unix".  Anything posted to the network is
"part of Unix", and demonstrates what a broad library of useful things "come
with Unix".  On the other hand, if it isn't "on the VMS tape", exactly as it
comes from DEC - it's not "part of VMS", and its lack can be used to demon-
strate how "feature poor" VMS is.

If I were to follow similar flawed reasoning with respect to Unix, I could
assert that Unix has no usable FORTRAN or Pascal compiler, and a buggy, non-
optimizing C compiler.  After all, the only compilers that are part of *Unix*,
as opposed to someone's proprietary port to their own hardware, are f77, pc
(or whatever the excuse for a Pascal system is called), and pcc.

							-- Jerry