Multiple executables in path (Was: NON-SOURCE POSTINGS CONSIDERED HARMFUL!)

[Dan Bernstein]

Tom, I posted a message saying ``I've always been satisfied with the
speed of'' followed by my which alias. It was short and to the point; it
was a direct followup to another article; and I hope somebody out there
finds the alias useful.

Then you started flaming, for no apparent reason. Why? We were having a
perfectly pleasant technical discussion until you jumped in (again).

Afterwards, you were making your usual pokes at the standard UNIX tools,
so I poked fun at perl---and that pushed you over the edge. An entire
article just to try to prove to the world how competent you are at
making up insults. Is perl really that close to your heart? I always
assume that criticism is meant to be constructive. Why don't you do the
same?

[End sermon. Begin light flames.]

In article <1991Jan23.142528.12085 at convex.com> tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
> The nature of my article was intended to echo Dan's: a bunch of 
> childish insults (which he calls libel when I utter them)

I'm glad you admit that you were uttering a bunch of childish insults.

> But
> I just won't put up with insults.

As anyone who has read this discussion can verify, any insults I've
thrown at you have been direct responses to insults on your part.
Witness this article, for example.

> I thought fire with fire might
> place perspective and show why it's a bad thing.

Bullshit. You were just trying to protect your wounded di

'Scuse me. What I mean is, to put it simply, ``You started.'' The fact
is that I was trying to contribute to a technical discussion, and you
began flaming for no reason.

> Dan ducked most technical issues.

We can get into an infinite loop of ``No, you ducked first'' here; I'm
sure that anyone who reviews the discussion will notice that you ducked
first, though you probably believe exactly the opposite.

> It's not a matter of quoting: it's one of complexity.  The algorithm I
> used, which has been demo'd in shell, perl, and even the shell from hell,
> uses a straightforward decomposition of the problem.  Others have
> concurred here that this approach seems more intuitive, legible, and
> maintainable than Dan's.  

Yes, one other person has agreed with you. So what? People have
opinions. As I've told you in e-mail, I find shell solutions easy to
deal with, for the same reason that you find perl solutions easy to deal
with.

> Maarten also pointed out that Dan's solution made mistakes.

No, it did not make mistakes. What Maarten pointed out was that my
``which'' did something different from his ``which.''

> Back to implementation language: do you really have csh on DOS, Mac's, etc?
> If so, why? Aren't you just spreading the sickness?  If not, then that
> solution isn't going to work even if you should have sed and tr.

sh has been around for five years on DOS.

Furthermore, as I've now told you twice and as you've repeatedly failed
to acknowledge, my alias could be written in any shell with no effort. I
only presented it as a csh alias because I use csh for interactive work
on most systems. It seems to have escaped you that unquoting and quoting
are five-letter commands in csh.

Tom, you are failing to look beyond the simplest level of syntax. Do you
criticize shars because they put X's before every line? Of course not:
if you have trouble reading with the X's, you just unpack or pipe
through sed. So why should you criticize a quoted alias, when all it
takes is one ``alias'' command to see it without the quoting?

> Give me a list of BSD and SysV systems, Dan, on which Perl will not
> compile and run.

Nobody's saying anything about where Perl *can* run. The question is
where it *does* run. Stop perverting the argument.

---Dan