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Hacking
4 quotes in the Hacking category.
Those who don’t understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
— Spencer on reinventing Unix poorly · Henry Spencer · c. 1987
Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.
— Gwyn on stupid and clever things · Doug Gwyn · c. 1980s
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build fresh rather than complicate old programs.
— McIlroy on doing one thing well · Doug McIlroy · c. 1978
If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1 at −1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn’t binary — the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is machine dependent.
— Gosper on twos-complement fascism · Bill Gosper · c. 1972