• Engywuck (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    We're all familiar with the story from Knuth that one of his students turned in an ALGOL exercise with the fragment esac; comment bletch tnemmoc;?

    No, please elaborate. In detail.

  • Engywuck (unregistered) in reply to user
    user:
    Its empty because it shouldn't ever be needed.

    Sure. And we all know the famous quote by Douglas Adams (in the fourth(?) hitchhiker book): The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

    Just one more example of it :-)

  • (cs) in reply to derari
    derari:
    Noughmad:
    I take it you've never seen a case statement in bash. There are few combinations of letter that sound more stupid than 'esac'.
    In many languages, the closing token is the opening token mirrored, e.g. '(' and ')', '{' and '}', or '[' and ']'. This is just consistency.

    I would accept explanation this if bash also used do...od loops

    Addendum (2013-11-07 07:35): "I would accept this explanation if" (doh)

  • fa2k (unregistered) in reply to Que
    Que:
    If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it. - W. C. FIELDS

    If at first you succeed or don't succeed, try again regardless

  • nobulate (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Smug Unix User:
    If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.
    I counter that with Fahnestock's Rule for Failure: "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."

    oh snap!

    # It's a hideous hack for the xfs metadata corruption bug that we've been seeing.
  • jarfil (unregistered) in reply to Roby McAndrew
    Roby McAndrew:
    I would accept explanation this if bash also used do...od loops
    fi

    Now, who told you bash was consistent? It's a shell scripting language, if you want consistency go use python... or perl.

    Yeah, actually go use perl [image]

  • (cs) in reply to nobulate
    nobulate:
    faoileag:
    Smug Unix User:
    If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.
    I counter that with Fahnestock's Rule for Failure: "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."

    oh snap!

    # It's a hideous hack for the xfs metadata corruption bug that we've been seeing. You are not expected to understand this.

    FTFY.

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to Artur Krajewski
    Artur Krajewski:
    Met too often ;-)

    try { [...] } catch (Exception ex) { #F### it. We always succeed. exit 0 return 0; }

    I always wrote it like this:

    try { [...] } finally { return; }

  • (cs) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    I always wrote it like this:

    try { [...] } finally { return; }

    That's going to work well.

  • The Vicar (unregistered)

    So, wait... this script sucks. And it's still marginally better than the ones which come with Linux distros, which are totally and completely useless.

    Par for the course; typical Open Source design. It would be more surprising if it worked properly.

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