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Back to the chalkboards to work out the syntax
While Thompson and Ritchie were at the chalkboard sketching out a file system, McIlroy was at his own chalkboard trying to sketch out how to connect processes together and to work out a prefix notation language to do it.
It wasn't easy. "It's very easy to say 'cat into grep into...,' or 'who into cat into grep,'" McIlroy explained. "But there are all these side parameters that these commands have; they just don't have input and output arguments, but they have all these options."
"Syntactically, it was not clear how to stick the options into this chain of things written in prefix notation, cat of grep of who [i.e. cat(grep(who))]," he said. "Syntactic blinders: I didn't see how to do it."
Next: "I'm going to do it," and so he did
![[ UNIX building blocks ]](images/86-300838-EM.jpeg)