Re: Gathering multiple statistics at once

[Jose E. Marchesi]

Hi Liliana.

> I'm trying to gather some statistics for a recfile I have, and it turns
> out that the only way of doing so currently are repeated calls to
> recsel, which perform a little more IO operations than would actually
> be needed.  So I wrote a small utility, that does all of those DB
> queries in one go, see the attachment.  (Please pardon the lack of
> tests.)
>
> I'm not quite sure whether the approach I've taken is the right one.
> Ideally, I'd like to instead extend field expressions, so that one
> could use selection expressions inside of them, e.g. Count(name) would
> count the number of name fields, but Count(name = 'Alice') would count
> the number of name fields, which are equal to 'Alice'.  Then, I could
> do a (collapsing) recsel over my phonebook and print "Count(name =
> 'Alice'),Count(name = 'Bob')...", which would tell me how many Alices,
> Bobs, and so on, I know.  For practical purposes, it might be necessary
> to impose that a name always be set with the colon operator.
>
> I hope my idea is getting across somewhat.  WDYT?

I certainly see the merits of having a tool like recstat.  I am busy now
with another project, but I will be back to recutils soon and follow up
on this.