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Programming Leftovers
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Whenhen ☛ No more Erlang manuals
I wrote a script called erl-man that takes one arg (the OTP module name). I put that in my ‘$home/bin’ directory, made it executable… it’s as follows: [...]
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Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Superimposed codes, take three
After I wrote last week that OEIS A286874 would stop at a(12) and that computing (verifying) a(13) would take about 4–5000 CPU years, the changes have finally been approved, and… the sequence includes a(13) = 26. What happened?
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Perl / Raku
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Chris ☛ Interacting With Text Adventures Through Perl
Text adventures are normally distributed in story files, which are bytecode for a text adventure interpreter. Since Perl can handle pipes, this seems set up for success: all we need is a text adventure interpreter that has a dumb terminal mode, where it uses plain stdin/stdout for interaction.
The community has informed me that there are a couple of popular alternatives for this: one is called dumbfrotz, and the other is using Bocfel with the cheapglk implementation. These are used by game authors and compiler writers in automated test suites. Just before I heard of those, I had come across fweep, which warns that it “does not require any special terminal mode or similar, therefore many features are unavailable.”
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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University of Toronto ☛ Another thing V7 Unix gave us is environment variables
Simon Tatham recently wondered "Why is PATH called PATH?". This made me wonder the closely related question of when environment variables appeared in Unix, and the answer is that the environment and environment variables appeared in V7 Unix as another of the things that made it so important to Unix history (also).
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