One-liner Program - History

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:

    “English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
    —Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)

    “Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
    —Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)

    “The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
    —Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)