Came here to post this, so instead I'll just back you up with a source:
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Reading-No...
"Add a programming language for extensibility and write part of the program in that language"
wow, that's just asking for trouble...
Remember that "yes" is the bottom end of complexity here, not the top. As the utility grows larger that stops looking like "asking for trouble" and starts looking like "often the only sensible solution". Expecting people to extend programs in C is often "asking for trouble", after all!
(Lately I've been really tempted to pull a Cato and start terminating my every HN post with "C delenda est." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est)
Never go full Cato.
Re:How is GNU `yes` so fast?
by emodendroket on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @09:17AM
(#14544471)
Yeah, I mean, who even uses emacs?
Youngster!
That's the LISP programming philosophy of the creator and host of this web forum
Does writing it in a different language suffice?
Depends how different.
This is the first revision:
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/ccbd1d7dc5189f46...
And here is the madness: :)
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/35217221c211f3...
And the motivation: it's used as test inputs. Not sure I agree with completely destroying the readability of a perfectly readable file - but ok.
The motivation, as far as I see, was only that it "may be used."
But see the post of belorn where he argues that the error handling seems to be good.
Is the date on that accurate, did that happen in 2016? Kinda hurts the theory that they were trying to avoid Unix similarity.
It says: Mar 9, 2015
One point in favor of this simple version is that it's immediately obvious that it doesn't do the same thing as the OpenBSD version. In OpenBSD `yes a b c` will only print "a" while in GNU it prints "a b c". I did not catch that when I was reading the more complicated modern version.
(joke) They copied the API of the main() function... :-)
At the risk of sounding like a copyright newbie, shouldn't that be covered by just doing a 'clean room' implementation? As long as you can verifiably prove that you didn't copy the source, it should fall under general use (as there's really only one way of doing such a thing), right? Much like Apple can't patent rectangles, although they tried.
The long-standing advice when writing GNU utilities used to be that if the program you were replacing was optimized for minimizing CPU use, write yours to minimize memory use, or vice-versa. Or in this case, if the program was optimized for simplicity, optimize for throughput.
It would have been very easy for the nascent GNU project to unintentionally produce a line-by-line equivalent of BSD yes.c, which would have potentially landed them in the 80/90s equivalent of the Google v.s. Oracle case.