On the floor of summer USENIX 83

[mark at cbosgd.UUCP]

I suppose we could all find some inconsistency in V6 UNIX to
counter Rob (e.g. ed regular expressions are different from
shell regular expressions), and I do wish I had had my set
of 6x9 Berkeley manuals there so I could have pulled them
from my briefcase as a counterexample, but he did make many
good points, and the gist of his talk was well worthwhile.
(I suppose I should point out that, even though he considers
cat -v to be wrong, I consider his Blit code to be wrong.
It's all in the eye of the beholder.)

I would like to see someone go through the manuals of system V
and 4.2BSD and heartlessly throw out as many options as possible.
Many of the options to, say, ls are just burying the poor user.
Notice I said options, not features.  Many features can be turned
on, with no way to turn them off, and almost nobody would mind.
(Of course, some zealot will complain about every one no matter
what you do.)  For example, the 4.2BSD "ls -g" option could be
always turned on, showing both owner and group.  The -i option
could be part of -l.  The -F option could be on unless -1 is on.
Similar arguments could be made for the tty driver - while it's
good to have all those strange bits to control at the ioctl level,
the user stty command needs only a few options.  Things like ctlecho,
crterase (or echoe for system V), should probably always be on.

I do strongly agree with Rob that page mode in the tty driver (or
in the terminal, if at least one manufacturer could be made to
do it right) would obviate the need for every program in the world
to filter its output through more.  Even the author of more felt the
code really belonged in the tty driver (although certainly not as fancy
as the more command is), but neither Berkeley nor USG will consider it.
Too bad - a half dozen UNIX systems have it (including the Fortune)
and it's a real win.

	Mark Horton