I find that anything I have to do twice winds up in a shell script, on the assumption that I’ll do it again. So I’ve written a lot of scripts lately, mostly to automate some tools to run our software validation system. These aren’t long (10-15 lines) and I freely give them to others knowing that they will either ignore it (mostly) or use it as is without ever looking at the internals.

I think that editor scripts have died out. ed is almost designed for scripting, and with vi, emacs, and other GUI based editors the concept of scripting the editor has died away. Sad, I do remember writing some really hairy ed scripts.

A quick read of Hank Levy’s book (thanks for the link) brings back (somewhat bad) memories of working on the iAPX 432. I found the chip interesting in concept, and poorly suited for what the company wanted done. Trying to fold the software to fit the hardware didn’t work out. The project was abandonded.

David

On Jul 5, 2018, at 1:49 PM, Steve Johnson <scj@yaccman.com> wrote:

That's an interesting topic, but it also gets my mind thinking about UNIX features that were wonderful but didn't evolve as computers did.

My two examples of this are editor scripts and shell scripts.   In the day, I would write at least one shell script and several editor scripts a day.  Most of them were 2-4 lines long and used once.  But they allowed operations to be done on multiple files quite quickly and safely.

With the advent of glass teletypes, shell scripts simply evaporated -- there was no equivalent.  (yes, there were programs like sed, but it wasn't the same...).  Changing, e.g., a function name oin 10 files got a lot more tedious.

With the advent of drag and drop and visual interfaces, shell scripts evaporated as well.   Once again, doing something on 10 files got harder than before.   I still use a lot of shell scripts, but mostly don't write them from scratch any more.

What abstraction mechanisms might we add back to Unix to fill these gaps?

Steve



----- Original Message -----
From:
"Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>

To:
"Bakul Shah" <bakul@bitblocks.com>
Cc:
<coff@tuhs.org>
Sent:
Thu, 5 Jul 2018 11:23:04 -0400
Subject:
Re: [COFF] Other OSes?




On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 2:40 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
On Jul 4, 2018, at 10:56 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> OK, I guess I'll be the one to start things going on the COFF list.
>
> What other features, ideas etc. were available in other operating
> systems which Unix should have picked up but didn't?
>
> [ Yes, I know, it's on-topic for TUHS but I doubt it will be for long! ]

- Capabilities (a number of OSes implemented them -- See Hank Levy's book:
  https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/
- Namespaces (plan9)

​+1 for both​



_______________________________________________
COFF mailing list
COFF@minnie.tuhs.org
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff

ᐧ
_______________________________________________
COFF mailing list
COFF@minnie.tuhs.org
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff