[vram22]

Just happened to see your reply here before I went off to sleep:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19276012

Interesting and maybe significant that you say: "Then we'll agree to disagree. I think you are wrong on so many points here, it's clear we're not going to agree, and probably won't find common ground."

First, interesting that you say "I think you are wrong on so many points here ..." but do not deign to offer any points to back up your statement. Kind of a cop-out, looks like. Anyone can say someone else is wrong; such statements do not carry any weight unless backed up with something more substantial.

And about your "four decades", like I said in a previous comment, years or age do not matter, facts do. I care not a whit if the person I am arguing with has 4 years or 4 decades or 4 centuries of experience. They (or I) can still be wrong (or right) about any specific topic we happen to be arguing about. I've been known to acknowledge that I was wrong, in arguments with people less experienced than me, many times, and vice versa has happened too.

Nor is finding "common ground" the goal (this is not some sort of compromise between political parties, it's a technical argument). Getting things right is the goal. For which, sometimes one party or the other may have to admit they are wrong - including me. Just that I do not think I am wrong in this case.

Will still write my fuller reply as I said earlier, to keep my word, and to make the picture more clear for other readers, since you have made these statements, even if you have hastily left the conversation.

[CarolineW]

OK, so as kazinator has pointed out, awk is now a mandatory part of Posix, and so is genuinely a part of "shell". My reply there says that I and my colleagues still think of awk as fundamentally different from other pipeline facilities such as tr, sed, sort, uniq, and so on, but I can see why it could, perhaps should, be though of as being "shell".

So it's shell. I might, however, given my background, and remembering as I do its first introduction, always have trouble thinking of it as such.

[CarolineW]

It's not a cop-out, we disagree.

> Nor is finding "common ground" the goal (this is not some sort of compromise between political parties, it's a technical argument).

We disagree. When there is a disagreement, finding what you agree with the the first step in finding where the lines of reasoning diverge. Finding common ground is the first step in resolving differences.

> Getting things right is the goal.

Sometimes in software there are judgement calls. Maybe this is one of them, maybe our definitions differ. Sometimes definitions differ because of context or experience. In each case, the terms used are not right or wrong, they are definitions that are useful in the context.

> For which, sometimes one party or the other may have to admit they are wrong - including me.

This is not an "I'm right, you're wrong" situation. By my experience, in my context, what you wrote would be called a "shell solution" in the same sense as the original command-line solution would be called a "shell solution."

You think that invoking AWK from the command line means that it's still a command-line script. Your definition of the terms means that you accept that invoking AWK still lets you call it a "shell solution."

I think that is fundamentally and structurally different from using command line utilities such as tr, sed, sort, and uniq.

So my position is clear - your solution that you call "shell" is not, in my opinion, just "shell". To me, your solution is an AWK solution, and you feed the output from your AWK program through shell utilities.

You are using the terms in a manner that is different from how I'm using them, that much is now clear.

Do you agree that you have written a shell script that invokes a program written in AWK?

Would it be different if you wrote a shell script that invoked a C program by calling a C interpreter? Would you still call it a "shell solution to the problem?"

Does it matter? Really? I've made clear why I've said that I don't class your solution as being shell, why do you care?