Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!umd5!zben From: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: Re: Shorter version of PostScript "Recycle" symbol Summary: Another advantage of shorter variable names Message-ID: <6785@umd5.umd.edu> Date: 29 Jun 90 17:23:08 GMT References: <6741@umd5.umd.edu> <185@heaven.woodside.ca.us> <6750@umd5.umd.edu> <186@heaven.woodside.ca.us> <6761@umd5.umd.edu> <188@heaven.woodside.ca.us> Reply-To: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) Organization: University of Maryland, College Park Lines: 33 Along the lines of shorter names, one of the people using the A.I. to Vanilla shell script noted it errored with a divide by zero when processing vertical text (yeah, the old arctan problem -- a physicist added lasers to our spacewar program in 1972, guess what happened when you fired your laser straight up...) Anyway, I tried to put in the fix and the awk call started complaining about "arguments too long". The structure is some preliminary options stuff then the construct: awk 'BEGIN { <7 pages of a pretty complicated awk program> }' $* and the additions pushed the size of the program over 8192 characters and evidently Unix has that limit on the size of "program arguments". Given the choice of purging the comments, throwing away the indentation, or shortening the variable names, I decided: s/currgray/cgr/g - Current gray value on output channel s/fillg/fgr/g - Current "fill" gray value input channel s/strokeg/sgr/g - Current "stroke" gray value input channel This made just about enough room for one more case in the code that reads a "matrix" and decomposes it back into a "translation", "rotation", and "scale". So here's another reason for using shorter names... -- Ben Cranston Warm and Fuzzy Networking Group, Egregious State University My cat is named "Perpetually Hungry Autonomous Carbon Unit"; I call him "Sam".