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The original strength of Unix also ends up being such a commonly frustrating feature: Everything is marshalled through strings. With human-manageable strings
by white-flame 12y ago
The original strength of Unix also ends up being such a commonly frustrating feature: Everything is marshalled through strings.
With human-manageable strings comes ambiguities, especially in concatenative situations like commandline expansion and SQL injection susceptible code.
There's really no good universal solution. Judiciously adding explicit boilerplate as the article describes, or using less open-ended syntax which ends up adding common syntactic overhead as well, are both more painful to the user in common cases.
- rikkus 12y agoOr use something like 'pash', a powershell work-alike for UNIX-likes.
- sjolsen 12y agoThe solution is actually pretty straightforward: don't do everything with text. The actual content you want to manipulate, sure, do that with text. But there's no good reason to structure with syntax except that that solution is compatible with even the most arcane computer interfaces. How you replace syntax-based structuring is the hard part, but it's not impossible.
- sukilot 12y agoWhat can you structure with besides syntax? Even data structures in memory have a (binary) syntax
- sjolsen 12y ago>What can you structure with besides syntax? At the interface level, nested navigable fields. >Even data structures in memory have a (binary) syntax No, they don't. Syntax is the expression of structure through the arrangement of the contents of a single sequence. Data structures as they are typically realized express structure through the relationships between several sequences.