>complexity itself is a sin Complexity is inherent to any task in some degree. That complexity must be expressed in full in any program which performs that tas

>complexity itself is a sin Complexity is inherent to any task in some degree. That complexity must be expressed in full in any program which performs that task correctly, whether in terms of language/library constructions or the ways in which those are combined. When the tools with which you implement a task (here, C and the core Unix API) are structured substantially differently than the high-level concepts of which that task is composed, there is additional complexity inherent to mapping those concepts. In light of that, I don't understand what you mean by, "complexity itself is a sin," unless you're referring specifically to the strictly unnecessary complexity introduced by a sub-optimal mapping of high-level semantics to core constructs. I don't think that's the kind of complexity we're seeing here. I think we're seeing the complexity inherent to mapping shell-level semantics to C semantics and the semantics of the Unix API, specifically error-handling semantics. I agree with jws that what this code demonstrates is that the core Unix API is difficult to use for writing precisely correct high-level programs, even ones as simple as echo. I feel that this is exactly why it's important that core high-level programs like echo encapsulate as much of the complexity of mapping to C as possible (that is, in the style of GNU rather than SysV): so that one can easily write reliable programs with high-level tools like the shell without worrying about that complexity.