| 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? |