Do only what only you can do.
-E. W. Dijkstra
taiji_jian is going to laugh at me for still harping on this, but 99% of you haven't heard it, so here goes:When you want to look up an IP by hostname (e.g.,
fingolfin.user.cis.ksu.edu, www.kddresearch.org, etc.), what program do you use?I use
nslookup. gondhir revealed the other day that he uses ping, to which I took exception because:- 1. Its specification does not (to my knowledge) guarantee that it prints an IP address; this is a side effect of certain implementations, whereas the primary purpose of
nslookupis to map names to and from IP addresses. - 2. It uses active sensing when the ("non-authoritative") answer may be readily available on the local domain name server without recourse to going out into the great wide Internet.
- 3. It is interactive. Some versions of it print continuously to standard output, and some stop after a default maximum of 4 pings (the Windows version, for example).
gondhir made sarcastic light of my aversion to hitting Ctrl-C when I shouldn't have had to, which earned him a pedantic little rant about streams, OS specificity, program control flow (Ctrl-C being a BREAK mechanism), and interactivity being taken for granted by punk kids today, with their hair and their clothes. :-DMon 24 Oct 2005:
[20:43:11] banazir: In any case, my point was
[20:43:32] banazir: that ping has a specific function - to actually signal the host computer using TCP/IP and see if it gets a response
[20:43:33] * sui_degeneris isn't afwaid of ^c
[20:43:39] banazir: Well
[20:43:49] banazir: I'm not afraid of giving broken URLs, Denise
[20:43:54] banazir: But wrong is wrong.
...
[20:44:33] gondhir: "Yew must noly use programs for the purpose they were designed for!"
[20:44:39] taiji_jian: (Bill is, in fact, correct. But it's more fun to needle him. :)
...
[20:56:18] gondhir: yer trying to hold me bax, OB1!
[20:56:21] taiji_jian: IOW
[20:56:21] gondhir: I *HATE* YEW!
[20:56:24] taiji_jian: Ping is easy and sloppy
[20:56:26] taiji_jian: ROFL
[20:56:30] banazir: lolol
[20:56:35] banazir: Yes!
[20:56:36] banazir: Quicker
[20:56:37] banazir: Easier
[20:56:39] *** taiji_jian has changed the topic on channel #teunc to Graham hat of Bill know no limit!.
[20:56:39] banazir: More SEDUCTIVELaugh it up, fuzzball!
It's still the case that only a Sith deals in infinite loops!
Case in point: the late E. W. Dijkstra is famously said to have once visited a CS department where someone let him run a demo program. It went into an infinite loop, and the authors said, "just hit ^C". Dijkstra allegedly asked, "What's ^C"?
--
Banazir
