13 lines
2.4 KiB
HTML
13 lines
2.4 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Swiss-Army chainsaw</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../S.html" title="S"/><link rel="previous" href="swapped-out.html" title="swapped out"/><link rel="next" href="swizzle.html" title="swizzle"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Swiss-Army chainsaw</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="swapped-out.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">S</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="swizzle.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="Swiss-Army-chainsaw"/><dt xmlns="" id="Swiss-Army-chainsaw"><b>Swiss-Army chainsaw</b></dt></dt><dd><p> In early Unix days, a well-known technical paper analogized the
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lexical analyzer generator <span class="citerefentry"><span class="refentrytitle">lex</span>(1)</span> to a Swiss-army knife; this was a comment
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on the remarkable variety of more general uses discovered for a program
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originally designed as a special-purpose code generator for writing
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compilers. Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described
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the <a href="../P/Perl.html"><i class="glossterm">Perl</i></a> scripting language as a “<span class="quote">Swiss-Army
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chainsaw</span>”, intending to convey his evaluation of the language as
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exceedingly powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes.
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This had two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a badge of
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pride, and (2) it entered more general usage to describe software that is
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highly versatile but distressingly inelegant.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="swapped-out.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../S.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="swizzle.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">swapped out </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> swizzle</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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