I'm surprised why anyone would bother with these routines

anymore, given the startling simplicity of Plan9's arg(3).

One stands in awe of such simplicity. I believe it was

William Cheswick who designed it, but I may be wrong.

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 5:25 PM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

RFS vs. NFS and sockets vs. STREAMS were much more serious; they were
about the directions Unix would take going forward, where interoperability
(RFS/NFS) and code portability (sockets/STREAMS) were big either/or issues.

Had AT&T been smarter about its licensing, both RFS and STREAMS might
have "won", but they weren't, and those technologies have all but
disappeared.

GNU getopt can be used in a source-compatible way with POSIX getopt;
having long options is up to the programmer.  I agree, there were
aesthetic arguments, altough long options have mostly "won".  I'm about
as long-time a Unix aficianado as anyone else here, and for many things
I find long options easier to remember than short ones.

(To their credit, at least initially, the GNU project asked its developers
to use the same long options in all programs for operations that were
the same.)

Arnold


George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:

> ... and then somebody GNUified it. I seem to recall three huge
> flamewars in UUCP days: RFS vs NFS, STREAMS (the original) vs sockets,
> and getopt
>
> --no -noo --nooo=please --dont-make-me=do-that
>
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 3:54 PM,  <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
> > Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> >> BY the time dmr adds stdio, it was
> >> still early enough in the life to displace the randomness for something as
> >> important as I/O, whereas lack of use of something.like getopt would not
> >> become clearly deficient until after widespread success.
> >
> > I think "widespread access" is more like it for getopt.  Getopt dates
> > to 1980; it was in System III (I just checked). That's only about two years
> > after V7 which was circa 1978.
> >
> > Here are the dates:
> >
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 1073 Apr 11  1980 usr/src/lib/libc/pdp11/gen/getopt.c
> > -rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 2273 May 16  1980 usr/src/man/man3/getopt.3c
> >
> > But the world outside the Bell System didn't have System III. Getopt
> > didn't become "popular" until System V or so, and became much easier to
> > adopt once Henry Spencer published his public domain rewrite of the code
> > and man page.
> >
> > Just a nit, (:-)
> >
> > Arnold