COFF November 2020

coff@tuhs.org

14 participants
13 discussions

Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Dave Horsfall

[ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ] On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote: > But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and > asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur. You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when inserting printf() statements? Oh dear; time to break out GDB... -- Dave

3 years, 5 months

Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Following clemc's example and moving to COFF] On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:19:24 -0800, Chris Torek wrote: >> I'm lazy. > > I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of smaller > windows in it. Agreed. There's a second issue here: for reading text, 70 to 80 n widths is optimal. For reading computer output, it should be much wider. I've compromised by fitting two 120 character wide xterms on my monitors, left and right. I still display only 70-80 characters for text. > I'd like to have a literal wall screen, especially if I'm in an > interior, windowless (as in physical glass windows) room, so that > part of the wall could be a "window" showing a view "outside" (real > time, or the ocean, or whatever) and other parts of the wall could > be the text I'm working on/with, etc. The issue there is perspective. I could do that (modulo cost) in my office, but I'd have a horizontal angle of about 90Â°, and that's uncomfortable. > (But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) ) Yes, that's about the widest I find comfortable, and it took me a while to adapt. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

3 years, 5 months

Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Clem Cole

I'd be curious to hear from the folks a few years older than I (I started in the later 60s with the GE-635), but my own experiences of having lived through some of it, I personally think it was more to do with all of the systems of the time switching from cards to the Model 28 and later the 33 then Unix or AT&T. Unix was just one of the systems that we used at the time of the transition from cards. But the other timesharing systems of those days began to transition to the tty's requirements. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 12:27 PM Stephen Clark <sclark46(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > On 11/6/20 12:13 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > > I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a > comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes > age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes > back and forth. > > > > I can’t, and never could, do that at 132. > > > > As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text > blocks. > > > > I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds > tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts > background of one kind or another,” argument. That may, however, merely be > confirmation bias. > > > > Adam > May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX. > > The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on > continuous > 5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g., > tractor > feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported > 74-character > lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated. > >

3 years, 5 months

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COFF November 2020