On 04/03/2021 13:31, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote (in part): Yes in Makefiles, otherwise I prefer 4 spaces per stop. I recall two colleagues working on the same Python-based project. One used a 3-column tab; the other used 8-column spaces. Few fireworks as the other simply filtered. This begs a question from me. My Solaris boxes have expand/unexpand but no entab/detab. What is the history there? N.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sln-gJaURzk&feature=player_detailpage#t…

On 3/4/21 1:50 PM, Rob Pike wrote: Thanks for the link into the video. If only every language were as helpful on the formatting code front :). I work with random folks who have differing opinions on the subject - this becomes apparent as soon as we try to integrate, with the notorious "inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation" error. Python drives me nuts with it's finickiness on this, all without providing a helpful way to resolve the issue. It's left up to the developer to fix. Go addresses this by normalizing the format. It's not just Python, I'm currently reading a C17 C++ book, at the moment, and the authors spend several pages on coding style. They eventually boil it down to "whatever you do, be consistent" - but the amount of time spent on this shows us why go's approach is vastly superior. No raging debate about braces on the same line or even tabs and spaces - just code it, let go sort out the style issues. Will

(Straying into COFF territory here) On Fri, 5 Mar 2021, John Gilmore wrote: I loathe make's distinguishment between tabs and spaces; they look the same on the screen, and last I looked computers are supposed to serve humans and not the other way around. -- Dave

On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 4:38 PM Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote: According to Eric Raymond in Chapter 15. Tools: make: Automating Your Recipes", *The Art of Unix Programming* *Why the tab in column 1? Yacc <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc> was new, Lex <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)> was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.* *— Stuart Feldman* ᐧ

John Cowan wrote in &lt;CAD2gp_SBTSLOgwz1=SXGWP7g8-kgunPzdgHxwxkP5=7xcRweyg(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;: |On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 5:06 PM Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote: |> *And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, \ |> most |> of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. \ |> The rest, |> sadly, is history.* |> *— Stuart Feldman* |> |Consequently, when he arrived at Google for his new job there, he was |initially supplied with a keyboard from which the Tab key had been removed |(at least according to various Googlers while I was there). Reminds me of members of the outgoing Clinton administration removing the "W" key from white house keyboards. Leads to nothing good, such... --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

Bakul Shah wrote in &lt;01BE1B3F-8745-4465-93EF-95AA83EFD494(a)iitbombay.org&gt;: Wonderful, i can re-answer in public, too, leaving something off. --- Forwarded from Bakul Shah &lt;bakul(a)iitbombay.org&gt; --- Maybe because alternate processing rips myself off. Sigh. ... |Oh. Hm. I heard this on American Forces |Network, told by Tony Scott, to which i listened from at least |Monday to Thursday 00am to 04am (German Time). When such things |were still possible, and thus in the first days, maybe the day it |happened. (Before "Max" was taken offline after Tony Scott issued |several "You can't say that on the radio", for sure.) He surely did for years before that. But i mean, hey, just an observation, i have no idea of american sensitivities. |But thanks for the pointer. Haven't we had this already in the |past? The above sounds dark and ugly to my ears, hmmmm. Yeah i mean, this arose by the beginning of the 90s, right. If the first examination does not reveal the desired result (but maybe the truth even, heh), then just perform a second .. a third one, until the result is absolutely what was wanted. Gulf war illness, Barschel's death, W keys on the keyboard .. you name it. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

On Sun, 14 Mar 2021, John Cowan wrote: That's a bit extreme... Although I confess to removing the CAPS LOCK and the Windoze keys on all of mine, as I can't think of a use for them and I tend to hit them by mistake. -- Dave, a hopeless typist

On Mon, 15 Mar 2021, Steve Nickolas wrote: I thought about remapping them, but couldn't think of anything useful to me. Anyway, my current keyboard is a MacBook, and the last time I prised out the CAPS LOCK I damaged the keyboard so I merely ignore it in Keyboard Preferences. I still can't think of a use for it these days, but I guess it's for compatibility with those mechanical things. At least there's no damned Windoze key to get in the way... -- Dave

Dave Horsfall &lt;dave(a)horsfall.org&gt; wrote: Come now people. Caps-lock keys are a requirement for your AOL account! ;-) Arnold

On Sun, 7 Mar 2021, Dave Horsfall wrote: I used to have my own system for doing "make"-like builds which was a lot more primitive and just relied on a tool that returned an errorlevel based on whether a file needed to be rebuilt. Of course, that was because I used an editor that destroyed tabs. :/ Damn it, M$... -uso.

On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 2:10 PM emanuel stiebler &lt;emu(a)e-bbes.com&gt; wrote: Does it help, if we differentiate with the type of text ? The Lisp community long ago standardized on 2-space indentation. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Income tax, if I may be pardoned for saying so, is a tax on income. --Lord Macnaghten (1901)

I use them incoherently, depending on context, time, and adherence to something approximating to xNF for some X, normal-form. Other peoples rules. What I found interesting, is the divergence in strategy in managing. strategy a: I shall show these as if they were 8 space indents. You maybe can change this. Its columns on the screen. strategy b: I shall, in a fit of lunacy, actually change these to align to the 8 space indent column implications. your source is now different strategy c: You ran some tool like tr over these, and now, Its your fault not mine. Good luck. I usually wound up in strategy c but some editors of the day did strategy b. I harbour a belief, this amongst other things, is why patch -l was invented. I know its heresy to contradict wiser people, but I think the number of circumstances where space/tab actually did affect baud- or data- rate was minimal. It was an effect more apparent and believed than real. Sure, if you used an ASR33 the head positioning was better. That experience set against being in a Vt52 or ADM5 world, by the time you were in a vdu display of 80x24 I think it was gone. I never consciously thought about it and I used both. It wasn't very material for the circumstances but I wasn't trying to cram source into a 2k memory to put into a rocket or a telephone switch or anything. It's a bit like steam-engine enthusiasts arguing about boiler tube design: most shunters don't care. People mostly hated me mucking around with their code. I can't blame them. It would be horrid to live in a really nicely laid out world in either tab or space-land and have a hooligan come and scribble over your art with a texta. Aside from simply coding bad answers to problems, I do note that sending people who demanded KNF non-KNF formatted code usually led to rapid rejection. The US is a place where people still use fixed-width fonts and specific spacing to file paper on the law courts, although I note Sydney Powell didn't bother spell checking before she sent in the incredibly weird conforming style of text. I should complain: the IETF idnit checker is feral. -G On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 10:55 AM Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote:

Preach!

On Thursday, 4 March 2021 at 15:27:27 -0600, Will Senn wrote: FWIW, I do this in my own code too. Once you know about it, it's not an issue. It helps to have an editor that highlights tab characters. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

Appropos my "laughably small" disk space comment, here's a snippet from mkfs.ext4: -m reserved-blocks-percentage Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks reserved for the super-user. This avoids fragmentation, and allows root-owned daemons, such as syslogd(8), to continue to function correctly after non-privileged processes are prevented from writing to the filesystem. The default percentage is 5%. I have several 12 TB disks scattered about my house. 5% of 12TB is 600GB. I'm pretty confident that all the spinning (no, tapes aren't spinning) storage at all of Bell Labs in 1975 was less than the reserved space for one of my disks. FWIW, I set "-m 0" for honker disks. -- jpl

On Thursday, 4 March 2021 at 23:08:53 +0100, Andy Kosela wrote: :-) Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 9:14 AM Steffen Nurpmeso &lt;steffen(a)sdaoden.eu&gt; wrote: That way lies APL madness. To exemplify, Kona is an open-source interpreter for Arthur Whitney's K version 3 language, which is closely related to APL, but crams almost all of the APL operators onto single ASCII characters with massive overloading. For example, monadic ! is APL "iota", but dyadic ! is "modulo" if both arguments are numbers and "rotate" if the right argument is a number and the left argument is a vector. What any of these has to do with the rest is beyond me: I had to create a set of flash cards to help me learn them all. Well, here's a procedure definition from the Kona source, in a file helpfully named kc.c (almost all of the source files have 1-2 character names): I wds_(K*a,FILE*f,I l) { S s=0,t=0; I b=0,c=0,m=0,n=0,v=0; K z=0; PDA p=0; I o=isatty(STDIN)&&f==stdin; if(-1==(c=getline_(&s,&n,f)))GC; appender(&t,&m,s,n); while(1==(v=complete(t,m,&p,0))) { b=parsedepth(p); if(o)prompt(b+l); if(-1==(c=getline_(&s,&n,f)))GC; appender(&t,&m,s,n); } SW(v){CS(2,show(kerr("unmatched"));GC) CS(3,show(kerr("nest")); GC)} z=newK(-3,m-1); strncpy(kC(z),t,m-1); cleanup: free(s); free(t); if(p)pdafree(p); if((v||c==-1)&&z){cd(z); *a=0;} else *a=z; R v?-v:c; } // -1 EOF, -2 unmatched, -3 nest If you want that sort of thing, you can certainly have it. Note the single-space ident and the cuddled right braces. Note also the label "cleanup:"; presumably a "goto cleanup;" is hidden somewhere in the single-letter (of course) macros. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org The peculiar excellence of comedy is its excellent fooling, and Aristophanes's claim to immortality is based upon one title only: he was a master maker of comedy, he could fool excellently. Here Gilbert stands side by side with him. He, too, could write the most admirable nonsense. There has never been better fooling than his, and a comparison with him carries nothing derogatory to the great Athenian. --Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

John Cowan wrote in &lt;CAD2gp_Qv7pO6P_LyZ=5zXm78GpBK4sUE2f8_4BBfyqJP7OSAJA(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;: |On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 9:14 AM Steffen Nurpmeso &lt;steffen(a)sdaoden.eu&gt; wrote: |> But, not important. A real change to my coding style came when |> i looked around Plan9 source code, the pragmatism to simply not |> use spaces in language constructs aka statements at all, for |> example "if(a){" instead of "if(a) {" or "if (a) {", and let alone |> "if (a)\nALIGN{\nALIGN" and whatever else. | |That way lies APL madness. To exemplify, Kona is an open-source |interpreter for Arthur Whitney's K version 3 language, which is closely |related to APL, but crams almost all of the APL operators onto single ASCII |characters with massive overloading. For example, monadic ! is APL "iota", |but dyadic ! is "modulo" if both arguments are numbers and "rotate" if the |right argument is a number and the left argument is a vector. What any of |these has to do with the rest is beyond me: I had to create a set of flash |cards to help me learn them all. | |Well, here's a procedure definition from the Kona source, in a file |helpfully named kc.c (almost all of the source files have 1-2 character |names): | |I wds_(K*a,FILE*f,I l) |{ S s=0,t=0; I b=0,c=0,m=0,n=0,v=0; K z=0; PDA p=0; | I o=isatty(STDIN)&&f==stdin; | if(-1==(c=getline_(&s,&n,f)))GC; | appender(&t,&m,s,n); | while(1==(v=complete(t,m,&p,0))) | { b=parsedepth(p); | if(o)prompt(b+l); | if(-1==(c=getline_(&s,&n,f)))GC; | appender(&t,&m,s,n); } | SW(v){CS(2,show(kerr("unmatched"));GC) CS(3,show(kerr("nest")); GC)} | z=newK(-3,m-1); | strncpy(kC(z),t,m-1); | cleanup: | free(s); free(t); | if(p)pdafree(p); | if((v||c==-1)&&z){cd(z); *a=0;} | else *a=z; | R v?-v:c; } // -1 EOF, -2 unmatched, -3 nest | |If you want that sort of thing, you can certainly have it. Note the |single-space ident and the cuddled right braces. Note also the label |"cleanup:"; presumably a "goto cleanup;" is hidden somewhere in the |single-letter (of course) macros. I do not, no. The above has maybe the advantage that you really really have to sit down and understand it as a whole before you change anything, or apply patches. This is very different to the style that sometimes can be seen in projects with many people and many patches, where code is packed in what-the-writer-thinks-is-a- logical-block. I (unfortunately) do it like that too, very unfortunately with diverging positions of what a logical block is. Just from a single pick, take Linux 5.10 ipc/sem.c. You see sma = sem_alloc(nsems); if (!sma) return -ENOMEM; sma->sem_perm.mode = (semflg & S_IRWXUGO); sma->sem_perm.key = key; 1 sma->sem_perm.security = NULL; 2 retval = security_sem_alloc(&sma->sem_perm); if (retval) { kvfree(sma); return retval; } and i know that i would sometimes remove the newline 1 to finish init of sem_perm, and instead introduce a newline before 2 instead. I have no idea of kernel of course, here .security depends on a special config and security_sem_alloc() just does nothing without it (returning 0), not even setting .security to NULL, whereas otherwise .security is definetely set by lsm_ipc_alloc(), so maybe i understand 1, .. sometimes. But i would think about it. And all of this just cannot happen with the code above, i could use this style to fool myself into just not thinking about just useless thoughts! --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

On Thu, 4 Mar 2021, Andy Kosela wrote: Urban myth. -- Dave

Bakul Shah writes: It could just be a translation problem - maybe it was 30 qubits and wasn't properly observed.

I'm pretty sure people knew the value of PI before 1611, when the Authorized Version was published, and that people had a pretty good idea when the event described in 1 Kings 7 happened, a bit before 900 BC. They used 3.1605 for the ratio in that time, I believe. The values in the Bible are as one would explain to someone in conversation about something else. If I said something was 10 feet across and 30 feet around in normal conversation, an error of a foot and a half would be close enough. When buying material, I use 4 as PI and trim to fit. Brantley.

On 3/5/21 2:50 AM, John Gilmore wrote: Sure there are! Depending on how you look at things and if you have the file systems to do it.... The venerable trick of temporarily moving everything to another file system, thereby vacating the source file system as much as possible, before moving files back. }:-) Is it pretty? No. Is it fast? No. Does it work? It's better than nothing. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On Friday, 5 March 2021 at 10:32:15 -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: Oops, that's what I get for reading messages sequentially :-( But in this case it's for small values of 10. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

And that comment from FreeBSD's "tunefs" is still there: You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish. Funny; I could've sworn that it used to be "cannot tuna fish". -- Dave

I haven't redirected this reply to COFF, though I was considering doing so: it On Friday, 5 March 2021 at 1:50:32 -0800, John Gilmore wrote: This appears to have been inherited from UFS. My recollection is pretty much the same for UFS, and even the man page entry for EXT4 is closely related to UFS newfs(8): Linux: -m reserved-blocks-percentage Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks reserved for the super-user. This avoids fragmentation, and allows root-owned daemons, such as syslogd(8), to continue to function correctly after non-privileged processes are prevented from writing to the filesystem. The default percentage is 5%. FreBSD: -m free-space The percentage of space reserved from normal users; the minimum free space threshold. The default value used is defined by MINFREE from <ufs/ffs/fs.h>, currently 8%. See tunefs(8) for more details on how to set this option. And I can confirm that file systems slow down significantly after the last 1% of free space has been used. Hopefully Ted will comment. But UFS has had even more decades. And arguably 600 GB on a modern disk is less of a concern than 15 MB on a 300 MB disk 40 years ago. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

Ha. I didn’t intend to reignite a flamewar. I was asking about the history. I got that and more :). But, i’m still curious about entab/detab abd expand, etc. Were they oor some of them created to help with this or what? Will Sent from my iPhone

In my first Unix job (roughly 40 years ago), I read the vi reference manual and memorized the keystroke commands. And then did % cd /user/include % vi *.h to fix up all the indents and comments. Later on I graduated to learning not to do control-p on a Vax console a second time. What were your mistakes? ("Always mount a scratch monkey") In

On 3/5/21 2:39 PM, Lawrence Stewart wrote Check out https://pre-commit.com/, which you can use just to check to to force a transformation before commit. Dan H.

On Sat, Mar 06, 2021 at 01:01:14PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote: Amen. I told my team "Optimize for reading, it's write once (or few) and read many". Anything that makes the code easier to read is a win even if it is more work for the writer.