Kevin Davidson wrote: > Anybody creating a concordance would find a use for ptx. Know any > linguists? (My father spent years writing software in Spitbol, Snobol > and later Perl and Python to produce this kind of result). > > Indexing a book? As has been demonstrated, its output bears no useful resemblance to the index of a book - no line numbers, for a start. A bit of wikipedia-mining tells me ptx implements a "KeyWord in Context" algorithm, and that these were a handy way of indexing archives of technical articles by title "before computerized full text search became common". I've got a linguistics degree, and frankly I'll take grep any day! > I've used linkers as late as the early 90s that required tsort, lorder > and ranlib to create archives suitable for one-pass linking. Wonderful > as the Gnu compilers and binutils are, in those days not every machine > had the RAM and diskspace to run it... I'm sure people did plenty of esoteric things decades ago - but that hardly explains what these executables are doing on my path today. After all, I don't have gcc or binutils... > There may be other obscure shell scripts that rely on things like this, > so there's no good reason to exclude them from a bundle of commands that > have existed since Version 7 (which predates System V in case the version > numbers are confusing :-) ) There's backwards-compatibility and then there's mediaeval reenactment! GNU coreutils isn't a leftover from the seventies; it was created from a merger of fileutils, shellutils, and textutils. And tsort and ptx were first added to GNU textutils in 1999... Oh, here's another example of a baffling coreutils program: link. It's obvious what it does: it creates hardlinks (and that's all). But what was the point of adding it to a collection that already included ln? -- JBR - Ilinniaqqikkiarturtinniqartussaq (West Greenlandic: "one who should be sent to further his studies") - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can find the EdLUG mailing list FAQ list at: http://www.edlug.org.uk/list_faq.html
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