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A comment on Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac. Parent comment

Re:Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac by imglorp on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @07:28AM (#20093911)
Yup, and then down in the code, it was #ifdef's up to your eyeballs[1], even if you went all the way and used autoconf/configure and then... more #ifdefs.

And we can tell our kids we had this thing called endianness which showed up in structure packing, system calls, network byte ordering, and hopefully portable binary file formats. Thankfully we had RPC and IDL to save us from that mess... not.

Oh and don't forget the windowing system war on top of the Unix war, all with different desktop and library concepts: CDE, Motif, Openwin, NeWS, DM, X11 and X10 at least.

One compatibility honorable mention goes to Apollo for at least making an attempt at flavor normalization: you could have an env var that would resolve a symlink at every file access near the top of the filesystem, where there would be a collection of different BSD/SystemV/Aegis(?) all running at once. [2]

1. https://maultech.com/chrislott/resources/cstyle/ifdefs.pdf

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS

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Re:Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac by stefan_ on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @04:47AM (#20102542)
Funny you should mention RPC because of course RPC was all the rage back in 1993, with the heap of garbage they called DCE/RPC.

To this date, this is the only network protocol I have ever seen that not only allowed you to choose the endianness you will use in the header, but also the floating point format.

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Re:Use zsh as the default shell on your Mac by rbanffy on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @05:00AM (#20102601)
The joys of CORBA and COM!
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