Re: missing way to extract data out of data

[Dale R. Worley]

Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> writes:
> Partly true.  seq(1) is a Linux thing, and was never part of any
> tradition, until Linux people started doing it.

Huh.  I started with Ultrix, and then SunOS, but don't remember learning
seq at a later date.

> (Before POSIX, it involved using expr(1) for every increment, which
> is simply abominable.)

And let's not forget the original "glob"!

But my point is that using external programs to do minor processing
tasks has a long history in shells.

> but beyond a certain
> point, trying to force a shell to act like a Real Programming Language
> is just not reasonable.

I've never tracked down why, but the Perl executable is a lot smaller
than the Bash executable.  So it's likely that turning a shell into a
Real Programming Language is also likely to be unusually expensive.

Dale