On Friday 19 October 2007, Orr Dunkelman wrote:
On 10/19/07, Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi Orr!
For some reason, I'm receiving the emails that you send to me, but not
the emails you send to the mailing list. It's a bit annoying. And I do
receive emails that get sent to the mailing list.
I don't know what is the cause of the problem.
As it turned out the problem was that I had the no duplicates option turned
on for my account in the mailing list.
I can only conjecture that you procmail me...
I don't filter you. I filter the Haifux mailing list based on the List-Id:
header, but that's all. I should note that I'm not using procmail to filter
my messages, but rather the KMail built-in filtering system. It's kind-of
lame, but it has very good integration with KMail, so if I move a mailbox, it
will also be moved in the filters.
Exactly. The point is not to teach the beauty of shell scripting.
Then what is the point? To teach a crippled programming language, not
unlike
many others?
Actually - yes.
The idealized version of the world where you teach only the useful staff is
far from being right for education due to many reasons. For example, the CS
dept. of the Technion still uses the assembler of PDP11 to teach assembler.
Now, if I had to change anything in CS in second semester, I would start
with PDP11 and not with CSH.
I don't care particularly which Assembly[1] language students learn, as long
as they do learn Assembly, and this Assemebly allows them to learn anything
they need, and it is taught right. I was told there are reasons for teaching
PDP-11 Assembly (or in EE's case - VAX Assembly).
However, teaching C-shell is Evil from the reasons I gave, and should be
corrected.
{
[1] - Assembly is the language, while Assembler is the program that translates
it to machine code.
}
The reason for that is (hopefully obvious). On
the other hand, the students will not gain much from this transition (in
the overall). On one hand, now they'll know assembler of i386 (which is
certainly more useful). On the other hand, now they'll have to spend lots
and lots of time on addressing the long jump vs. the short jump (and we are
not getting into the problems of 64-bit addresses!). So all in all, they
still teach PDP11 because they have a good reason (because they want to
teach the idea behind assembler, and not how to write assembly code for
i386. Once you get the general idea of assembly, switching from PDP11 to
i386 is only small details).
Right.
So I guess teaching TCSH had its merits in the past. You will need to ask
the teachers why they teach this.
Perhaps they wanted Tcsh because it had better interactive features than
Bourne Shell (/bin/sh) had.
I suggest you'll approach the lecturers in charge to get a better
understanding why they teach this shell rather than that shell (like
Eyal
did).
Maybe I will. But I still think my Anti-csh page was a good idea for
concentrating all the arguments in one place.
An Anti- page is always the wrong place to start any of these things.
Why?
As for the beauty thing - beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
True, but I think we all can agree that shell scripting without sed, awk,
find, and much less Perl or whatever, is much less beautiful than shell
scripting with them. And I don't see a point in teaching it this way.
No. We do not agree on that.
I used to do shell scripting in DOS (batch files), where sed, awk, and
other cool stuff were not available.
DOS has a poor excuse for a shell. Someone told me that 100-lines of DOS Batch
files he wrote ended up as 50 lines of C. The Windows NT shell (CMD.EXE) is
much better, but still very bad in comparison to what Bash offers.
Windows is going to have the so-called Windows PowerShell -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell , which is based on .NET,
more high-level, and Windows-specific. And naturally, you can install bash or
zsh on Windows using cygwin or a different Windows emulation.
And we are talking about concepts. I find the concept of using a smaller
instruction set to be actually more elegant then using many commands (think
of interoperability of a DOS batch file between various windows
distributions without any real support for stuff).
Well, as much as a smaller instruction set has its merits, tools like find,
sed (or its equivalents), etc. are an integral part of shell scripting and
good shell programmers are expected to put them into good use.
Like it or not a small amount of primitives, can and usually is too limiting.
Consider for example what Bjarne Stroustrup writes in
http://public.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#Java :
Much of the relative simplicity of Java is - like for most new languages -
partly an illusion and partly a function of its incompleteness. As time
passes, Java will grow significantly in size and complexity. It will double
or triple in
