This could be why Obiwan wound up a hermit? (Programmers of my generation at least talk about “Obiwan errors” because his name sounds like “off-by-one”.)

There were breaking changes between C and C++ (and some divergent evolution since the initial split) as well as breaking changes between different releases of C++ itself. I am not saying these never happened, but the powers that be controlling the standard have worked hard to minimize these for better or worse.

If I took one of my earliest ANSI C programs from the 80s and ran it through a C++23 compiler, I would probably need to remove a bunch of register statements and maybe check if an assumption of 16-bit int is going to land me in some trouble, but otherwise, I think it would build as long as it’s not linking in any 3rd party libraries.

I think the thing with C++ is they have tried to maintain backward compatibility from Day 1. You can take a C++ program from the 80s (or heck, even a straight up C program), and there’s a good chance it will compile as-is, which is rather astonishing considering modern C++ feels like a different language.

But I think this is what leads to a lot of the complexity as it stands? By contrast, I started Python in the Python 2 era, and when they switched to 3, I was like “Wow, did they just break hello world?” It’s a different philosophy and has its trade-offs. By reinventing itself, it can get rid of the legacy cruft that never worked well or required hacky workarounds, but old code will not simply run under the new interpreter. You have to hope your migration tools are up to the task.

The thing about the MPW Shell is it was sort of the only game in town if you actually wanted a command line with the classic Mac OS. (There’s an awesome little emulator called SheepShaver if you ever want to explore it btw.) Well, I suppose there was A/UX. I thought it was a miracle when that came out. You have to realize in those early days a good chunk of the operating system itself was actually baked in to ROM. (You had to do desperate things to squeeze a GUI out of such limited resources as existed back then!) So to this day I have no idea how they managed to spin off a 'nix despite that.

Anyways. I wonder, if you made some sort of template format today, to what extent you could write some sort of conversion tool that would scrape a man page or whatever to rough it in and then you could tweak it to get what you want? man pages aren’t super standardized in their format I guess, so it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. I like to use Python’s argparse when rolling out scripts myself, and its --help format is pretty rigid given that it’s algorithmically generated. Might be more plausible with something like that? I had a quick look just now to see if you can drill down into the argparse.ArgumentParser class itself to pull out the info more directly, but it seems a rather opaque thing that doesn’t expose public APIs for that. Oh well…

This reminds me of something from my ancient past. Back in the early-ish days of Apple, there was a development system called MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop) which included its own little kludgy shell.

The weird thing about it though was while you could enter commands on the command line like in any shell, you could prefix them with the word commando (presumably a portmanteau of “command” and “window”) and this window would pop up showing various buttons, checkboxes, etc. correponding to command line options. When you ok’d the window, it would generate the command line for you.

I’m rather hazy about how all this worked, but I think there was some sort of template language to define the window layout if you wanted to add commando support for your own tool? And presumeably, as you say, you could restrict what’s possible with the window interface as you deemed fit?

I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)

Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.

Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.

If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

This was a struggle for me going from hobbyist programmer to working at a company. I tried to tone it down. Really. But eventually I got “promoted” to having my own office with a suspiciously thick door. Hmm…

True story. I was looking for an answer to an obscure problem and found it in a 10-year-old stackoverflow post. Then I looked more closely at the author…

Hey! Me from 10 years ago, stop being such a smart ass! It’s obnoxious.

1st reaction: lmao

2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!

I have some vague recollection of a hacker convention from the 90s where people were challenged to come up with wireless networking in a one night coding marathon. (This was long before wifi.) So some dude used speech synthesis to get a machine to say “one zero one one zero…” and another to assemble the binary data into packets using speech recognition. It was hilarious, and the dev had to keep telling people to shut up and stop laughing so he could complete the demo.

But anyways… what I’m trying to suggest here is you might have the best luck if your notification sounds contain spoken commands and you use speech recognition to trigger scripts? That tech is pretty mature at this point.

I was astonished to find the other day that LibreOffice has no problem opening ClarisWorks files. That is an ancient Mac format that even Apple’s Pages has long since abandoned.

This is a big deal. The UN doesn’t throw the term genocide around lightly. And I thank the OP for linking directly to their site to give as unadulterated a reporting as possible.

There is an issue with templated code where the implementation does have to be in the header as well, though that is not the case here. C++20 introduced modules which I guess were meant to sort out this mess, but it has been a rocky road getting them to be supported by compilers.

Looks like we’ve got a Java programmer here taking C++ for a spin.

Oh yeah, that’s another way to make a subshell. But don’t forget to stick the find in there also:

sudo sh -c 'cd ./testar && find . -maxdepth 1 -type d,f' | ...

The commands within the parentheses run in a temporarily created subshell with its own environment. So you can change the working directory within it and it won’t effect your main shell’s working directory.

Let’s say you’re in the home directory that’s called /home/joe. You could go something like:

> (cd bin && pwd) && pwd
/home/joe/bin
/home/joe

If find had something equivalent to tar -C, you wouldn’t need to do this, but I don’t think it does?

Ok, I actually tried something like this at a terminal. You do still need the -C ./testar if you use the subshell since tar won’t know where to look otherwise.

(sudo cd ./testar && sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -type d,f)  | sudo tar -czvf ./xtractar/tar2/testbackup2.tgz -C ./testar -T -

This will still give you a listing with ./text.tz and so on because find prints ./whatever when you search .. I think this is harmless? But I suppose you could remove them if it bothers you.

(sudo cd ./testar && sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -type d,f)  | cut -c3- | sudo tar -czvf ./xtractar/tar2/testbackup2.tgz -C ./testar -T -

I think that since you’re piping in the file list from find, the -C ./testar in the tar command is basically irrelevant? You probably need to cd ./testar before the find. Maybe you could do that in a subshell so that the cd doesn’t affect your tar archive path? So something like:

(sudo cd ./testar && sudo find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type d,f)  | sudo tar -czvf ./xtractar/tar2/testbackup2.tgz -T -

Ah ok, that makes more sense. It does look like there is only a single highway linking the town of Feodosia to Kerch, so a blockage along that route would be annoying to the Russians, though obviously not as catastrophic as an attack on the Kerch Bridge itself.