[prog] Sample implementations of UNIX utilities.

Mary mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org
Tue Dec 24 08:12:20 EST 2002


On Mon, Dec 23, 2002, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
> > The GNU implementations of most utilities is much too complex for my
> > purposes (teaching C).
> 
> First--no, I don't know of any simple implementations.  I imagine
> you'll have a very hard time finding them.  Most production code is
> infamously hairy, to handle infamously hairy problems that only exist
> in production environments.

I was pointed on another list to the busybox code. While much of it is
still rather long, it's quite nice code and easy to strip.

> That said--if you have any discretion in what language you're
> teaching, have you considered Python, Java or LISP?

As it happens, it's a second year university course, and I don't design
it. I develop materials for it.

I found C quite useful to study when I was an undergraduate, because it
was only after learning C that I understood memory use and references v.
values etc. This is the second language for most of the students, after
Java, and concurrent with assembler.

Incidently, I personally am a reserach programmer, not a systems
programmer, and the bottlenecks in natural language (my area) are
normally not network bandwidth, although they might be memory. That
said, not much natural language programming is done in C.

-Mary



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