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The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..

Thomas Wouters thomas at xs4all.net
Thu May 18 08:54:35 EDT 2000 
On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 10:30:58PM +0100, Grant Griffin wrote:

> BTW, why to you Unix people separate your packager gizmo from your
> compression gizmo?  Very strange...

Strange ? Really ? I find it strange you would want to put different
functionality into one program... Packing and compressing are two different
things, so why force one program to do both ? :)

So much better to seperate the functionality: If you get a new version of
the compress utility, or a new compress utility that does it so much better,
you wont have to change anything in the packing utility. And the other way
'round. And decent packaging utilities provide support to magically include
compression, by calling the appropriate compress utility itself... GNU tar
has support for standard unix compress (.Z), gnu zip (.gz) and bzip2 (.bz2)
this way, and you can tell it to start any program you wish, with the
'--use-compress=' option.

Just like there isn't a Wordperfect or Word-alike program on (traditional)
UNIX; no all-encompassing Word-processor. Instead, you edit using your own
favorite editor, passing it through your own favorite text formatter, to
translate it to a file format of your choosing. And just like Mosaic, long
ago, didn't provide support for all protocols itself, but rather let other
programs take care of them... You can see a lot has changed in the UNIX
world, in this regard :-)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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