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From: schwartz@gondor.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Picking a character from a word
Message-ID: <3475@psuvax1.psu.edu>
Date: 25 Apr 88 07:29:38 GMT
References: <578@amethyst.ma.arizona.edu> <894@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <2715@bsu-cs.UUCP>
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Summary: how orthogonal can you get.

In article <2715@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>The solutions offered to this question point out a weakness in the UNIX
>utilities:
>
>     The UNIX utilities are far from being a minimal, orthogonal,
>     complete set of tools.

In particular, they do nothing to help one refill laser printer 
toner cartridges. :-) :-) :-)

Seriously, though, it is unavoidable that as newer, more powerful tools
are introduced (expanding our vector space of solvable problems) they
sometimes necessarily overlap with other tools.  Often this is because
we humans like to see each tool do a particular non trivial set to
tasks well.  Then there are upward compatability issues.  Anyone want
to toss out sed just because awk can do it's job?  My shell scripts
would never forgive me!

>There is a lot of overlap in what the different tools do.  Yet there
>are many things that none of them do properly.

I agree with you to some extent, but I think that you are unfairly
judging what is "proper".  For example, awk solved the n-th character
problem perfectly, except that it is considered to be too slow.
"cut" is redundant with "awk", but is included in our toolchest because it
is less general but more efficient.  The same argument applies to
shell builtins.  They are a language feature that make the shell a better
tool at the expense of redundancy with other things.

Anyway, this is a reasonable topic for discussion, so:
Where would you suggest we start trimming things?  
What do you think they don't handle properly?

>Reckless speculation follows:  Perhaps AT&T, while designing the latest
>and greatest non-BSD version of UNIX, will do something about this.

Not likely, given the need for upward compatablilty with the present.
Fortunately, I think that this forum will have something to say about
the issue. :-)


-- Scott Schwartz     schwartz@gondor.cs.psu.edu    schwartz@psuvaxg.bitnet