History
The word One-liner has two references in the index of the book The AWK Programming Language (the book is often referred to by the abbreviation TAPL). It explains the programming language AWK, which is part of the Unix operating system. The authors explain the birth of the One-liner paradigm with their daily work on early Unix machines:
The 1977 version had only a few built-in variables and predefined functions. It was designed for writing short programs Our model was that an invocation would be one or two lines long, typed in and used immediately. Defaults were chosen to match this style We, being the authors, knew how the language was supposed to be used, and so we only wrote one-liners.Notice that this original definition of a One-liner implies immediate execution of the program without any compilation. So, in a strict sense, only source code for interpreted languages qualifies as a One-liner. But this strict understanding of a One-liner was broadened in 1985 when the IOCCC introduced the category of Best One Liner for C, which is a compiled language.
Read more about this topic: One-liner Program
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)