Re: ED error code

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 03:52:02PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:

> I think it still makes sense to remove that ED macro if it serves no
> purpose

Who says that amusing hackers is not an important purpose? :-)

(Especially in a volunteer project like this... See
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/10/ofun.html )

On a more serious note, I'm a bit ambiguous about this. On the one hand,
it's a bit silly that programs fail because of something that was just
meant to be a joke. On the other hand, strictly speaking it's their
fault for using reserved identifiers...

BTW, for those who don't catch the joke: It is a reference to the
standard UNIX editor "ed". The original version (and also GNU ed, if
invoked without -v) will always print just a '?' whenever a command can
not be executed for any reason. The ed tutorial has this to say about
it:

   If at any time you make an error in the commands
   you type to ed, it will tell you by typing
   ?
   This is about as cryptic as it can be, but with practice,
   you can usually figure out how you goofed.

-antrik-