On Jul 14, 2016 7:01 PM, "Peter Jeremy" <peter(a)rulingia.com> wrote:
>
> On 2016-Jul-15 08:36:56 +1000, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
> >On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Clem Cole wrote:
> >And on the Mac and FreeBSD, they still are (as well as being builtins).
>
> FreeBSD provides a convenient list of what commands are (currently)
builtin
> to the provided shells and available externally:
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?builtin
>
Bash man page does as well along with command -v (and hash IIRC) letting
you know.
I've always been curious though - what was the reason behind implementing
/bin/[ ? IDK any shell where this isn't implemented - I always assumed it's
a POSIX compatibility stopgap older systems needed to stay compliant with
their shipped shell.
I remember hearing that originally the Unix shell had control structures
(e.g. if, while, case) implemented through external commands. However,
I can't see this reflected in the source code. The 7th Edition Bourne
shell has these commands built-in (usr/src/cmd/sh/cmd.c), while the 6th
Edition (usr/source/s2/sh.c) seems to lack them completely.
The only external command I found was glob, which performed wildcard
expansion.
Am I missing something? Was this implemented in a version that was
never released? If so, does anyone know how this implementation worked?
(Nested commands might require holding some sort of globally
accessible stack.)
> As far as I know, it [|] has always been used as 'or' on computers.
I was on the NPL (eventually PL/I) committee when IBM 'generously'
increased the 360 character set from 48 to 60. George Radin grabbed
| for OR, before IBM announced the character set. Previously
the customary use for | in logic was the "Scheffer stroke", which
we now know as NAND. So "always" is ever since it became available.
Was PL/I the first to adopt it?
Doug
Dave Horsfall:
I still remember when the pipe command was "^" (pointy hat).
====
I still remember--barely--when \136 was up-arrow, not carat!
I don't think pipe was ever only ^, but that ^ was a
synonym for | added to make it easier to use on older
upper-case terminals that had no |. Those (remaining
few) who were there at the time can perhaps clarify.
I still habitually quote shell arguments containing ^,
even though I haven't used a shell that required that
since late 1984 (Rob had removed the special meaning
from /bin/sh before I arrived at Bell Labs). On the
other hand, I still cannot be bothered to get used to
quoting arguments containing !; I just disable all
that history and editing bloatware whenever possible.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Ok, I hope this question isn't too off-topic...
I was looking through the X10R3 source tree trying to find the
earliest paint program for X. I wasn't able to see anything that
looked like a paint program.
Xpaint might be the oldest, wikipedia says the first version appeared in 1989.
Searching for xpaint on tuhs returned no matches, but I saw that
4.3BSD-Tahoe had some old X programs but nothing listed there seemed
to be a paint program.
Maybe xgedit? It's listed as a "simple graphic editor for the X window
system", but I don't know if it really qualifies as a paint program.
Mark
On 2016-07-11 04:00, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
>> > Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
>> > comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
>> > Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which
>> > means they all share a common root.
> Absolutely.
>
>> > What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from
>> > English?
> Because when words change, they change according to common patterns
> specific to the language. For example, a change between Old English (OE)
> and Modern English (ModE) is that long-a has become long-o. Consequently,
> the descendants of OE bát, tá, ác are ModE boat, toe, oak. In Scots,
> which is also descended from OE, this change did not operate, and long-a
> changed in the Great Vowel Shift along with long-a from other sources,
> giving the Older Scots words bait, tae, eik. However, current Scots
> does not use bait, but rather boat, and we can see that because this
> breaks the pattern it must be a borrowing from English.
So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying that Old English
also borrowed the word from English?
(See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)
>> > (I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
> OE steor 'steering oar, rudder' + bord 'side of a ship'. Parallel
> formations gave us common Scandinavian styrbord from ON stjórnborði,
> similarly Dutch stuurbord, German Steuerbord. Larboard, the other side,
> began life as Middle English ladde 'load' + bord, because it was the side
> you loaded a ship from, and was altered under the influence of starboard.
> Because the two were easily confused, port officially replaced it in the
> 19C, though it had been used in this meaning since the 16C.
Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from
bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. No
rudder to break... And it's from way before medieval times... But I'm
pretty sure the term is from even before the Vikings were around.
Johnny
I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
would give an Englishman a stroke.
If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
after the brief but illuminating detour on character sets and the
evolution of human languages, we now return you to the Unix Heritage
mailing list :-)
[ Please! ]
Cheers, Warren
If 19961 is the oldest citation the OED can come up with, "slash"
really is a coinage of the computer age. Yet the character had
been in algebra books for centuries. The oral tradition that underlies
eqn would be the authority for a "solid" name. I suspect, though,
that regardless of what the algebra books called it, the name
would be "divided by".
This is sheer hypothesis, but I have always thought that \ got
onto printer chains and type balls as a crude drawing aid. Ditto
for |. Once the characters became available people began to find
uses for them.
