Re: [edlug] tsort command

[Kevin Davidson <kevin@xxx.xxx.xxx>]

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?

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...

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 :-) )
--
Kevin Davidson
Apple Certified System Administrator
Sent from my iPhone

indigospring :Making Sense of IT
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t 0870 745 4001

On 18 Nov 2009, at 13:55, Justin B Rye <edlug@xxx.xxx.xxx>  
wrote:

> David McKelvie wrote:
> > tsort = topological sort
> [...]
> >   Anyhow, that's where tsort came from.  To solve an old problem with
> > the way the linker handled archive files, which has since been solved
> > in different ways.
>
> I'm aware that it served a purpose in seventies releases of UNIX.
> That would be a good explanation if a legacy version was included in
> some esoteric cross-platform-development package or other.
>
> But no, the GNU Project decided that ptx and tsort needed to be
> reimplemented and included in coreutils, a collection of "essential"
> commandline tools that wasn't assembled in one package until 2003.
>
> Maybe the decision was made by single transferable vote?
>
> (Thanks, Alex!  Any suggestions for ptx?)
> --
> JBR    A long time ago this practice was followed, especially in the
>    upper classes, but today even the children of the lower
>    classes perform no executions, and this is extreme negligence
>                _Hagakure_, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1716)
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