On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:42:39 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> Nice choice of "-" and "=" there. :-P

Typo. ;)

> But yes, that's why the names. Because, obviously 1 character = 1 byte.
> Oh, wait...

When you're dealing with ASCII (and EBCDIC, IIRC), that is most certainly 
true.

> And hey, even if that were true, it's *still* an inconsistent naming of
> command switches. Some commands expect -c and some expect -b, and you
> just have to memorise which is which. (A tiny few commands accept BOTH,
> and actually do the correct thing with multi-byte characters... But not
> very many!)

Like I said, programmer's prerogative.

>>> But then again, we're not talking about a coherently designed system,
>>> we're talking about a random collection of tools and utilities
>>> independently developed by unrelated individuals over the course of
>>> 70+ years. Add in a few layers of backwards compatibility and YUCK!>_<
>>
>> Try about 50 years.  UNIX came about in 1969.  Some of the development
>> work obviously would've been before it was released.
> 
> That's a bit before my time. But the main point still stands - it's a
> collection of tools independently developed by mostly unrelated
> individuals over a period of several decades. There never was any
> overarching design plan.

There was for the underlying architecture, but yes, developers who wrote 
different tools didn't coordinate.  You sound surprised by that for some 
reason.

Jim

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