Do only what only you can do.
-E. W. Dijkstra
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
. 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
nslookup
is 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).
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 SEDUCTIVE
Laugh 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