Darren New wrote:

> The original UNIX *design* was clean too, but the accumulation of 
> historical file names is nasty. The other ugliness, IMO, is the number 
> of places where an API is not provided but instead it's a file format, 
> or a library, or something like that. Stuff like opening a directory as 
> a file to read the directory (cured when BSD 4 forced a directory format 
> changed), reading /etc/passwd and parsing it to get information (cured 
> when shadow password files became common), etc.

The amount of backwards compatibility in Unix is scary. (E.g., do you 
know how many signals "init" responds to? Lots.)

OTOH, have you looked at the IA-32 manuals? There's a huge wedge of the 
stuff in there too... :-S

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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