I'm tryin', bd... I'm tryin'... but I just cain't make myself tick that box...
I hesitated for a really long time. Now, I won't go back. And I was brought up on ()(()) calculation. I even sometimes understood what I did.
But start with
dc and the man page.
Story from work (yesterday, actually): We have a couple of machines that we only have serial connectivity to from the office net. They can get to the Internet quite OK, albeit NATted. They're DNS and DHCP for the untrusted network, and therefore need some isolation. Also, they're OpenBSD, because that is one of the more secure variants of Unixy computing around.
So, they run plain ISC dhcpd, and also Unbound for resolving, with a setup there they run anycast DNS and DHCP in failover.
The challenge was to add a few new nets to DHCP, and since I know how that's done, and the young'uns at work (who like API's and Python and stuff) don't, I guided them through it. We used:
- SSH to high port on terminal server.
- vi (not vim!)
- rcs ("Welcome to 1995. This is what git replaced, about 5 iterations back")
- uuencode and uudecode (cut and paste in serial terminal newer works 100%, but uu stuff was built to survive 300 baud acoustical coupler modems...)
- ...and a buncha other stuff.
They most appreciated the drive through
vi -- I've been writing all my private email in
vi for 25 years, so the things I do will take some effort to pass on. Especially to people who sit in IDE's and have colour in
vim.
My catch phrase was "Bill Joy does not like to wait for the teletype on long commands. So he made them shorter." Although, to be fair, on a TTY, I'd stick to
ed. And Joy didn't write
ed.
Anyway, this is all roughly comparable in feedback and terseness to
dc. Which I highly reccommend.