guru is a sophisticated program synthesis and system maintenance
tool developed after midnight in numerous university computing labs.
It is based on the famous LISP Hacker system, used to develop AI
programs on TENEX. guru reads a problem description from the
standard input. An innovative and occasionally correct solution is
generated and written to the standard output. Typically, guru is
invoked repeatedly until an acceptable solution is generated or the
user community has learned to live with the problem.
The bugreport mechanism sometimes invokes guru. In this case guru
executes at a priority inversely proportional to the reported
urgency of the bug. Feature enhancements run at high priority
whereas critical problems are fixed only when the machine would
otherwise be idle.
If the standard input is empty, guru uses its program synthesis
capabilities to generate a selection of screen editors, X widgets,
compilers, sundry games and the occasional diatribe.
OPTIONS
-e program
New features are added to an existing program. This option should
be used with caution as the enhanced program may behave
unpredictably or not at all.
-f
Reconstructs filesystems after a crash.
-p target
Ports the entire system on which guru is executing to target,
preferably a RISC machine. This is an extremely time consuming
operation and is not guaranteed to terminate.
If more than one option is specified, guru may thrash. Each copy of
guru has its own set of unique, additional and undocumented options.
SEE ALSO
YAPS: Yet another Program Synthesiser by S C Johnson.
NOTES
Inherent design limitations prevent guru from synthesising comments.
The programs generated are undocumented. The lucidity, politeness,
relevance and language of the occasional diatribe vary considerably.
The only diagnostic is an occasional ``I deserve a raise'' - which
may be ignored albeit doing so may provoke ``I resign'' - an
unrecoverable error.
Sending the output of one guru into another can produce quite
startling results.
