13 Jan
2020
13 Jan
'20
4:25 a.m.
> After scrolling through the command list, I
wondered how
> long it was and asked to have it counted. Easy, I thought,
> just pass it to a wc-like program. But "just pass it" and
> "wc-like" were not givens as they are in Unix culture.
> It took several minutes for the gurus to do it--without
> leaving emacs, if I remember right.
This is kind of illustrative of the '60s acid
trip that
perpetuates in programming "Everything's a string maaaaan".
The output is seen as truth because the representation is
for some reason too hard to get at or too hard to cascade
through the system.
How did strings get into the discussion? Warner showed how
emacs could be expected to do the job--and more efficiently
than the Unix way, at that: (list-length (command-list-fn)).
The surprise was that this wasn't readily available.
Back then, in fact, you couldn't ask sh for its command
list. help|wc couldn't be done because help wasn't there.
Emacs had a different problem. It had a universal internal
interface--lists rather than strings--yet did not have
a way to cause this particular list to "cascade through
the system". (print(command-list-fn)) was provided, while
(command-list-fn) was hidden.
Doug