The unity of Unix

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A few curses

Lets clear up a few possible misunderstandings by saying right at the start:

Windows is bad, Gates and Balmer are very nasty men!

Good, now to get back to Unix. As is often the case with Unix apologists, when you criticise Unix they come back with something saying "no, no, you are wrong, really Unix is wonderful".

Now lets have a look at curses.

Firstly you tell me that the Unix approach of treating everything as stream of bytes is better than "obscure, low level APIs". Now, I look at curses and it is a set of subroutines and therefore basically an API.

Secondly curses, is a way of addressing the screen physically on a byte by byte basis. If you have come from a system that defines the screen as structure and allows you to address the contents of fields on the screen as variables you might perhaps understand why curses seems extremely inadequate to me.

The same analogy applies to file access. Of course you can access a file randomly using Unix utilities but only by a pointer and not by any logical addressing mechanism.

I stick with my position that in order to anything useful with Unix you need other system software that sits on top of it. This system software could run on any operating system. The advantage of Unix is that it gives the customer more hardware choice because the system software is easier to port from one Unix to another than it is to port from, say VMS to Unix. This ought, in theory any, make the systems software cheaper on Unix platforms.

Unix is fairly ubiquitous and something we have to live with (at least for the moment) but great it is not.

It is difficult to see any reason why the computer industry could not produce an operating system that is both robust and user friendly. By user friendly I don't mean just slapping a GUI on top of something, aside from anything else I am not totally convinced that GUIs are really that user friendly, but I don't have time or space to go into the detail of that here.

Posted by: jorwell   Posted on: 07/29/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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