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 whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)