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by iheartmemcache
3778 days ago
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If you know the term 'argument' sure. Your mind thinks "ok.. args.. x ..variable, so this could be variable in the categorical sense or cardinal sense". Curl? Really? When I first saw that after 10 years of wget'ing (yeah I've been at this a while), I had no intuition what it was until I saw the arguments being passed. My first thought was literally "like the weird Olympics sport with brushes on ice?" It took me half a minute to realize it had to do with URLs (and I still don't know what the 'c' means - though I'm sure GNUinfo or a man page would easily answer that). Print is semi intuitive, but it could mean so many things. Print in awk vs print in tcsh might have entirely different behavior. Is there a \n appended? How do you delimit it? It might give you a vague idea, but you're still going to have to go to your informational resource of choice in order to figure out: a) the parameters to pass to it, b) the output formatting/delimiters/implicit \r or \n's, etc. (e.g. Hell, in Python 2 you add a comma to prevent a new-line - I'm not even sure that syntax was influenced from (though logically I can understand the comma-suffix implies additional components and thus you want to suppress any line-break), I'd be hard-pressed to the etymology of that). Brings me right back to the 'functor' issue. But hey, at least a ML functor is entirely different from C++. They overloaded the term (like delta or mu might be overloaded in math) but at least I don't have the risk of using it and getting 'partially consistent' behavior. (For example, having print exhibit the same properties as bash would plus a side-cases added by the author as 'feature enhancements' which work great for him, but if his side-project gains traction will just lead to more ambiguity.) |
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Oh! "curl" is "c url". It's taken me several years to understand that, and I knew exactly what it did! I imagined my data "curling" off the website, down the intertubes to my filesystem.