That is an honour to me, Mr. Doug McIlroy. Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: |With no offense intended, I can't help noting the irony of the |following paragraph appearing in a message in the company of |others that address Unix "bloat". To me writing documentation is an enormous pain. I find it extraordinary hard to find the words to describe some technical aspect to an imaginery broad audience of human beings. It requires many iterations until i am somewhat satisfied, and, as something like an excuse, this specific part is very fresh. |Except for the ISO citations, this paragraph says the same |thing more succinctly. | |'\cX' represents a nonprintable character Y in terms of the | printable character X whose binary code is obtained | by adding 0x40 (decimal 64) to that for Y. (In some | historical contexts, '^' plays the role of '\c'.) | Alternative standard representations for certain | nonprinting characters, e.g. '\a', '\n', '\t' above, | are preferred by S-nail. '\c@' (NUL) serves as a | string terminator regardless of following characters. | |And this version, 1/3 the length of the original, tells all |one really needs to know. | |'\cX' represents a nonprintable character Y in terms of the | printable character X whose binary code is obtained | by adding 0x40 (decimal 64) to that for Y. '\c@' | (NUL) serves as a string terminator regardless of | following characters. This is brief and concise. The last sentence could not be used like that, because the \c@ is an extension that, different to \0*, \x0*, \[uU]0*, really terminates the entire argument list, not "further output for the quoted argument". I have to mark it as a non-standard extension. Thanks for pointing this out. I am wondering. Chekhov said: Ich glaube nicht an unsere Intelligenz, die heuchlerisch, falsch, hysterisch, ungebildet und faul ist, ich glaube ihr sogar dann nicht, wenn sie leidet und klagt, denn ihre Unterdrücker kommen doch aus ihrem eigenen Schoß. Ich glaube an den einzelnen Menschen, ich sehe die Rettung in den Einzelpersönlichkeiten[.] I don't believe in our Intelligence, that is insincere, false, hysterical, illiterate and lazy, i don't believe in it even when she [it] suffers and laments, because her [its] suppressors still come from her [its] own womb. I believe in the individual Human, i see the Salvage in the Individual. I know for sure that this last example of yours is too concise for a broad audience, a "nonprintable character" without a describing context is an anachronism. To me the question is, in a world of increasingly omnipresent trivialism, where the human being remains just as hormone driven, and not in only a small propertion somewhat unreflected, as it always has been, but becomes more and more de-facto controllable, far, far beyond the purging sunday morning thunderstorm from the pulpit (and here being optimistic, and wearing western world glasses), faster, much faster than most souls, and here the story of the African Expedition which was beaten along by the white master, until after some days the bearers refused to march on at any cost, to "wait for their souls to catch up", are, so how to strengthen the individual with its, that is my believe, as a Buddhist, sole obligation of doing that step towards reflection, of self-awareness in a holistic whole. I know the software i maintain is by far not where i want to see it, also regarding the documentation. For one we are by far not powerful enough, other aspects are much too bloated. We do not yet fully comply to the POSIX standard. But we slowly become more reliable, also for non-interactive use cases. And correct. And i refer to the not yet released version, which will be a step forward, after one year and a half of what i call full-time development. I want us to move to a place where even an inexperienced user can teach her- or himself, and gain -- hopefully -- satisfying results simply by reading the manual. To get a notion of what actually happens, or at least a notion of the problems that are involved. Or, at the very least, to get some hints to keep in mind for the next time Internet is accessible or an experienced user can be talked to etc. I think that, and i want to see and have a lower hurdle on the documentation side. I get frustrated when i really have to go Google, and cannot get any help, but see a nice and stylish link asking whether "this page was helpful". Or HTMLized GNU info pages, with a paragraph per HTML page. I think that such behaviour increases aggression, increases the feeling of inferiority, and if its under the surface. It will at least try to rise to the surface, one way or the other, that is programmed in the afterbrain, or at a not too much higher level. Some intellegent millionairs and other alpha leaders may even think it is funny to play with that, but i, for myself, reject that direction. It is a little bit ridiculous. For now i end up with ‘\cX’ Emits the non-printable (ASCII and compatible) C0 con‐ trol codes 0 (NUL) to 31 (US), and 127 (DEL). Print‐ able representations of ASCII control codes can be created by mapping them to a different part of the ASCII character set, which is possible by adding the number 64 for the codes 0 to 31, e.g., 7 (BEL) is ‘7 + 64 = 71 = G’. The real operation is a bitwise logical XOR with 64 (bit 7 set, see vexpr[253]), thus also covering code 127 (DEL), which is mapped to 63 (ques- tion mark): ‘vexpr ^ 127 64’. Whereas historically circumflex notation has often been used for visualization purposes of control codes, e.g., ‘^G’, the reverse solidus notation has been standardized: ‘\cG’. Some control codes also have standardized (ISO 10646, ISO C) aliases, as shown above (e.g., ‘\a’, ‘\n’, ‘\t’): whenever such an alias exists it will be used for display purposes. The con‐ trol code NUL (‘\c@’, a non-standard extension) ends argument processing without producing further output. The vexpr[253] is an active link. (In a capable less(1). And to yet another new builtin command which performs arithmetic and string operations, but we now have macros with arguments, and even though we do not yet have loop control statements, managing counters etc. may already be useful. As an overall question, if we would have a multi-process approach, like sam has, maybe we could simply use a communication channel to some arbitrary shell or awk script to perform such things. But this software will see its 39th birthday in six weeks and one day from now on, and it was not designed that way. So it is easier to have a 483 line `vexpr' implementation. It also does have saturated signed 64-bit arithmetic. And it provides the right error messages. I do hope the future will bring some size reduction again nonetheless, while also providing better message access. Or any access at all. In the end, it does not make sense to provide a clean program if it is of no use at all, nor can be plugged together with other programs to form a Unix pipe that provides something useful. I hope for both, and that increasingly reliable.) --steffen