Re: "Interview with the Author of 'Mastering cat'"

On Wednesday 01 April 2009 16:17:30 Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 01, 2009, Shlomi Fish wrote about "[hackers-il] "Interview with 
the Author of 'Mastering cat'"":
> > I'm going to publish a new book for O'Reilly titled "Mastering cat". Here
> > is an interview O'Reilly-Net conducted with me about it:
> >
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Mastering-Cat/
>
> I have heard rumors that both 'lynx' and 'tomcat' are projects that can
> trace their ancestry to the 'cat' project. Can you comment on that?
>

Of course they are. All the Mac OS X releases, which are named after the great 
cats ("Tiger", "Leopard", "Lion", etc.) also originated by concatenating many 
sources of the cat command (using cat), and then whipping them into shape to 
look like a GUI OS (also using cat). It's not true that they were based on 
other programs from the BSD code - only cat.

Incidentally, there are rumours that Apple are about to release an 
interactive, GUI-based, version of the cat command called iCat. 

> Also, is it true that both 'tac' and 'rev' were actually attempts to create
> clones of 'cat', but their developers were unable to replicate cat's
> ingenious algorithms, resulting in buggy algorithms which caused the input
> to be reversed, something which the developers of tac and rev later said
> was "a feature, not a bug"?

Actually, the opposite. cat originated as a way to save a few keystrokes and 
streamline the logic of doing "tac | tac" and "rev | rev". I cover this 
historical anecdote in my book. Using tac and/or rev twice also has the 
advantage of eliminating "useless use of cat" complaints. I also cover this in 
my book.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

>
> :-)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
"The Human Hacking Field Guide" - http://xrl.us/bjn8q

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we
read.



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