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A comment on Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972). Parent comment

Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by Koshkin on Thursday March 11, 2021 @09:30AM (#26424346)
I try ed(1) once in a while and I find it pretty usable (and even rather efficient if you know what you are doing). cat(1) also works if you just want to type a new text.

Speaking of terseness, I love the the fact that C does not have 'fn'.

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Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by rootbear on Thursday March 11, 2021 @09:45AM (#26424498)
We used to speak of a great Unix systems programmer as someone who could write device drivers with cat and have them compile and run the first time.
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Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by siltpotato on Thursday March 11, 2021 @12:45PM (#26426785)
Before I look up `man cat`, what can you do with `cat` other than just see what's in a file?
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Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by Crespyl on Thursday March 11, 2021 @03:14PM (#26428476)
When not given a file, cat will just read from stdin, so you can use "cat > file.c", write some text, and send EOF with ^D when you're done.

Obviously, there's no way to go back and edit anything mid-stream, you have to write the whole thing out in one shot.

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Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by Koshkin on Thursday March 11, 2021 @03:35PM (#26428700)
The backspace does work within the line.
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Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by exikyut on Friday March 12, 2021 @06:06AM (#26434446)
If your terminal is in line-buffered mode.
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Re:Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) by amyjess on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:52PM (#26443775)
You can join files together.

    $ cat foo bar > baz
will join the files foo and bar together into a single file called baz
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