🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec15.202449.28162@rd.hydro.on.ca> twriter@rd.hydro.on.ca (Timothy Writer) writes:
>>The number of times where it really matters whether two programs are run 
>>concurrently at half speed or sequentially at full speed is so tiny, that I 
>>doubt if it's on anybody's "10 most important projects" list.
>
>Can you support that statement?  I doubt it.  It may be true for DOS
>users because they have never had the option but I don't think it's true
>for the wider user community.  Consider the following (UNIX commands):
>
>	cc -E program.c | more
>
>I use this to view the result of running the C preprocessor on my
>program when I suspect a problem with a complex macro.  I don't want to
>wait for the first command to complete before I can view the results.

I don't deny that there are some cases where there's a difference.  But 
how often do you really have problems with complex macros?  If it's as 
often as once a week, I'd suggest that you're doing something wrong.

>	man cc | more
>
>Suppose I just want to check the syntax of a particular option for the C
>compiler.  The most common options are documented at the beginning (for
>obvious reasons) so I don't want to wait for the entire manual page to
>be formatted first.  In fact, if I quit once I've found what I'm looking
>for, man cc never runs to completeion!  This may not matter to me much
>but it may matter to other users who are sharing the CPU with me.

Under DOS, nobody is sharing the CPU with you.  Under DOS, the weird idea 
that you should pass a manual page through a text formatter every time you 
want to look at it never caught on; help systems keep their text in a format 
that's convenient to display.

>zcat huge.tar.Z | tar tvf - | grep 'foo*.c'
>
>Here I'm just looking for some files matching a pattern in a LARGE
>compressed archive.  Do you really want to uncompress and list the
>entire contents of the archive?  What if you don't have the disk space
>for the entire archive?

Under DOS, there are lots of programs available to search the text contained 
in archives without uncompressing them, and every archive program that I've 
ever seen will list the filenames without uncompressing the archive.  For 
example, I'd probably run

  pkunzip -v huge foo*.c

to do what you did above.  The idea that you have to uncompress 
anything at all just to see the filenames strikes me as a very bad design.

Duncan Murdoch
dmurdoch@mast.queensu.ca