ick, botched my procmail script preparing for the

[Laura Creighton]

flood I have just allowed myself because you asked an important question
and worth listening to every happy linux user about why anybody who
thinks linux is obselete deserves a lot of flamage.  This is okay,
I am a pweor mh and procmail user, who gets thousands of mails every
day, and just got my 87th telling me to use Tim Powers docstrings ...
what's a few thousand more?
Laura
------------
you are using an obselete and dated operating system.  You have heard of
course that every programming task needs to be done twice, first to
understand the problem and the second time to do it correctly.  Do
you want to know what Ken Thompson, inventer of unix, and Dennis Richie
and Rob Pike and the rest of the gang at 1127 (Bell Labs Research,
the lab where the stuff happened, and will keep on happening up until
Lucent goes bellly up which I fear will be very soon.  Lucent got 
Bell Labs Research and basically killed it.  Crime against humanity.
At any rate if you are worried if you are using obselete stuff, you are
and you need to join the plan 9 mailing list which is gated to comp.os.plan9
and run plan 9 instead of whatever you are using now.  And weep for the
state of the world. This is what Ken Thompson did for the second one to get 
it right.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&group=comp.os.plan9

Its free.
Its Open Sourced.
And it is so beautiful in places that I cried.

(oh -- in a user community of under 100 I think ... we of course ported
python.)  And we have a Tk that doesn't use wretched old Tcl either.
(well inferno does see: http://www.vitanuova.com/)

About those algorithms you talked about ... I am too busy to
discuss them now, and I can't do so in comp.lang.python where we
are trying to decide how to keep the world from ending because
we just extended the class of people-who-could-do-something
dangerous-with-a-computer to all the people who should never
ever be trusted with a loaded floating point.

However, if you go to comp.os.plan9 you will find pleanty of
people who are capable of discussing this.  Become somewhat 
knowledgable about plan 9 first and then ask away about why
did you use this algorithm and not that. See if you can get 
a lesson in how to turn a JACM into an algorithm.  It is
the single most useful skill I have got.

<unless-its-how-to-use-mh-and-procmail-ly yours> (this is a python
					  tradition.  do not try it
					  in the plan9 list where
					  we don't want cute.)
Laura