Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!uwvax!picard.cs.wisc.edu!quale
From: quale@picard.cs.wisc.edu (Douglas E. Quale)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: How wrong is MS-DOS? (or: What is the definition of obsolete)
Message-ID: <1991Jan13.052930.6546@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 13 Jan 91 05:29:30 GMT
References: <PPESSI.91Jan12222745@spiderman.hut.fi> <11234@lanl.gov>
Sender: quale@picard.cs.wisc.edu
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 19

In article <11234@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>From article <PPESSI.91Jan12222745@spiderman.hut.fi>, by ppessi@niksula.hut.fi (Pekka Pessi):
>> [...]
>> 	See regex(3). So you are not ignorant about Unix? 
>
>No, I'm not.  The existence of regex(3) _supports_ my prosition on grep.
>That is: grep is a trivial tool that doesn't have any business being a
>separate utility.  In nearly every context where people recommend the
>use of grep, regex() is a _better_ solution.  For one thing, it saves
>the overhead of using pipes - passing the strings as procedure arguments
>is a lot more efficient (in this case, the pipe overhead is probably
>_bigger_ than the execution time of the whole pattern search).  Or, is

That's right.  Every time I want to do a one time only search for a
pattern I write, compile and debug a program to do it, because it saves
a few milliseconds of the *computer's* time.  User's time isn't important.

-- Doug Quale
quale@picard.cs.wisc.edu