Subj : Re: Windows vs Linux
To   : boraxman
From : tenser
Date : Wed Apr 27 2022 01:47:16

On 26 Apr 2022 at 12:38a, boraxman pondered and said...
 
 bo>  te> With /etc/passwd?  Nope.  That doesn't work.  Because
 bo>  te> the parser is are built into a library.  And even on
 bo>  te> systems where I can hack the library, I might use
 bo>  te> something like LDAP or NIS, or even shell scripts and
 bo>  te> rsync or rdist to copy those to machines where I can't
 bo>  te> hack the library for some reason.  So no, that doesn't
 bo>  te> work for /etc/passwd.
 bo> 
 bo> Treat '/' as an escape character.  Always.  Thats it.

Nope.  See what I wrote above, re-read your response,
and try to figure out how that would work.  Particularly
since the pathname separator in both the shell and home
directory fields is '/' in /etc/passwd.

 bo> Yes, and quoted strings suck, because they may have within themselves,
 bo> quotes.  The parser has to know whether "," is a delimiter or not.  You
 bo> may have ," and ",/  Quote are not universally used either.  The one I
 bo> had to write was using CSV data where spaced strings may or may not be
 bo> quoted, within the same file.  That a fault of implementation of
 bo> whatever wrote that data, than the CSV format itself, but such
 bo> differences are more likely.

Actually, lexical analysis of strings literals with embedded
quotes escaped by backslashes is a trivial regular expression:
/"(\.|[^\\"])*"/

 bo> And that is one definite improvement that powershell brings.  Over time,
 bo> I'm sure Windows will have the same composability, it just is at the
 bo> moment perhaps not being used to its full extent, because using windows
 bo> that way is something relatively new.

Again, PowerShell is 15 years old.

 bo> What you don't see, is developers leveraging existing tools, existing
 bo> capabilties, and stringing them together to solve problems.

That is blatantly false.  This is exactly how software is
built these days.  Have you ever done professional software
development?

 bo> We get closed box solutions, usually a web based app.

THIS may be true, but you are missing the forest for the
trees.  How do you think those "closed box solutions" are
built?  You seem to be asserting that their structure is
a function of some kind of dominant system paradigm based
on a worldview focused through a Windows-centric mentality,
yes?  If that's the case, I think you know very few people
actually doing this kind of work.

 bo> I call it as I see it.  The current computing paradigm is broken, error
 bo> prone, and these are errors that I deal with professionally. 
 bo> Transcription errors, wrong information on a specification, unclear
 bo> status of documents, these are errors which result in costly rejects. 
 bo> When data is poorly managed, when it is difficult to consolidate, to
 bo> query, to ratify, mistakes happen.  The opacity between the different
 bo> tools provides points of failure.  As I said, errors come about from
 bo> people incorrectly typing data, data that has already been entered and
 bo> verified.  It has to be typed because the tools don't allow the machine
 bo> to do the transcription.

I have no idea what you do professionally, but I think
you are trying to extrapolate your personal experience
to the industry writ large and that just doesn't follow.

 bo> generate documents could do this.  Maybe Windows can, but if so, its now
 bo> doing it late in its development, and it will take a culture shift.

You're conflating systems with things that run on those
systems and asserting that one implies the other.  I'm
sorry, but that simply does not follow.

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