Re: Weird spelling fixes in 2.1.107

Albert D. Cahalan (acahalan@cs.uml.edu)
Sat, 27 Jun 1998 14:57:30 -0400 (EDT)


Peter T. Breuer writes:
> "A month of sundays ago Albert D. Cahalan wrote:"
>> Peter T. Breuer writes:

>> So I must put significant work into a parser that will understand
>
> Well, this is a leading question, and should be rejected by the judge!
> I.e, the answer is yes, AND there isn't any significant work involved
> in writing a parser.

Ah, have I found a volunteer?

>> whatever crazy changes might happen (an AI parser), and get a
>> result that is very slow. No thanks. Dumb parsing is slow enough.
>
> Parsing is very fast, as any measurement will show. You are just
> ill-informed (and wrong) here. See, for example (with apologies, since

Do it 12000 times every second.

> Linus produced a good example of fast snappy parsing via a simple state
> machine when he did the dependencies speedup code.

Such a state machine would have failed, because the changes
have been too unpredictable.

> Perhaps one thing people need is a dynamically configurable command
...
> dynamically cionfigurable parser as a shell script. Looks like it works

Shell script? Parsing thousands of /proc files per second?
You also forgot the AI. I'm serious about the AI.

I really do not think you could have written a parser to handle
both Linux 2.0 and a (then future) Linux 2.1. Who would have guessed
that the "SigCgt" in /proc/*/status would turn into "SigCat"?
Who would have guessed that the signal info in /proc/*/stat would
change from 32-bit decimal to 64-bit hex?

If you can guess what strange changes will happen by Linux 2.4,
please tell me how to write a parser for them.

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