🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6984@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
+
+I'm unhappy with "extensions" to the pattern matching convention, particularly
+since I think it should be done in the shell (well, I can dream). How about
+making a second-order jump:
+
+	^. in pascal becomes -> in C, so:
+
+1> list lformat="%s" -> cpio -ocv > rdf:df0
+
+So "->" is "redirect to program".

Fooey!  That is my favorite choice, and I wanted to spring it on you (given
the recent chastizing post about posting non-essential stuff!).  It seems to
be the most logical choice, since (a) it is another derivation of `>', like
`>>' for append, and >, <, >>, <<, and -> all seem to me to be in the same
class of operators.  

I really dislike wildcard expansion in the shell.  Granted, it would have
been nicer in 1.3, since there was no library support of standard pattern
matching, but now that 2.0 has good, standardized routines to do this, I
can't for the life of me see how shell expansion is superior.  The amount of
coding that must be done is no greater, the size of your programs is no
greater, and having the expansion done by the current program eliminates all
of that silly quoting that you have to remember to do in Un*x, whenever you
want to pass wildcards to a program.  It is just a lot easier to write a
program like Arp's move, which does exactly what I expect it to if I say
	move #?.c sys:backups/src/#?.bak
since move gets to decide how to handle the patterns.  I guess this is a
religious question.

+<peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.

ken
-- 
     Ken Yarnall                 ///   yarnall@usceast.cs.scarolina.EDU
      Math Department, USC   \\\///   yarnall@ucseast.UUCP
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    `You'd better tie me up.' -- from the movie, "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down"