Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!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: <58236@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Date: 24 Apr 89 22:43:01 GMT
Sender: root@yale.UUCP
Organization: Yale Computer Science Department, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Lines: 38
X-from: leichter@CS.YALE.EDU (Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU))

In article <6914@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>, dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi) writes...
>In article <58080@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> leichter@CS.YALE.EDU (Jerry Leichter
>(LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU)) writes:
>     The thing that is so silly about this debate is that it misses the
>     obvious answer...Sure; I've had [grep] on every VMS system I've
>     used since V2.3 or so, and before that I used it on RSTS and RSX
>     systems
> 
>thus making the point that if it's available for VMS from somewhere, it
>should not be considered a deficiency in VMS....
> 
>Can I reasonably assume that the user will have make ("MMS" on VMS
>systems)?

Can I reasonably assume that a user on a Unix system has access, somehow, to a
usable Pascal compiler?  Don Knuth made the assumption that Pascal would be
universally available when he developed TeX.  Unix versions of TeX took longer
to arrive and stabilize than those for almost any other system!  Hell, it was
easily available on PC's with good old MSDOS before it could be found for many
Unix systems - and in fact it is available today only because a couple of
people made a major investment of their own time to do WEB2C, which converts
the TeX WEB source to C.

Oh, BTW, can I assume that any Unix system has WEB2C?

The same argument can be made for FORTRAN - and, for that matter, for any
programming language you can name with the exception of C and, to an extent,
C++.  (At least for C++ you know where to get a copy if you want it, even if
you don't have it.)

If you start out designing things in the Unix mold, of course they will be
easily portable to Unix systems, not so easily portable to other systems.
So what?  I can create things for VMS using very handy features - e.g., the
ability to CALL a decent help interface from within my own code and not have
to worry about the details - which no "baseline" Unix system can handle.  I'll
argue that that's as important an ability as the presence of grep on the
standard distribution tape.
							-- Jerry