Re: substr() - copying or not copying, that is here the question.

In article <101hlls$24vmc$1@dont-email.me>,
Janis Papanagnou  <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
...

You are describing the individual practical accustoming to writing
own extensions.

Well, yeah.  I have already scaled the hurdles to which I refer.
I was trying to give you a pointer towards getting there yourself.
You are, of course, free to ignore and/or mock my attempts.

Okay. My viewpoint was another.
>
It's IMO a problem if folks write own index() extension in his/her
own version and code quality. We see proliferations of own versions
in all areas of IT; and I don't see it as a desirable goal.

This is the fundamental issue in computing.  Is it better for people to
be free to do their own versions of things, or are we obliged to coalesce
around versions written by "professionals"?  It all goes back to that
famous "letter to the editor", written by one William Gates III, arguing
strongly for the later.

The general consensus in the FOSS world is towards the former, but from
time to time, I see certain people here arguing for the later.

(Anyway. Core evolutions are deprecated. And it won't happen.)

Exactly.  That's the bottom line.  That's why both Ben and I are discussing
this in the context of a user-written extension function/library.

You are, of course, free to continue whining that it should be changed in
the core, by the official developers.  Lots of luck with that.

[*] I find it already a bit, umm, strange to have three different
substitution functions in GNU Awk (two historic/standard and one
somewhat generalized and extended).

That's the way it is.
It can't change (either in the general or the specific).

[**] Do we need grep, egrep, fgrep - on my system they are not
even hardlinks -, or should grep be used with options grep -E,
grep -F ?

Personally, I don't think "grep" should ever be used at all any more -
except for certain specific, controlled, simple cases.  Much the same
argument can be (and has been, on this very newsgroup) applied to the use
of "sed".

Unix has a lot of historical cruft commands that aren't really relevant
any more - e.g., join, comm, sed, sort (yes, I'm pushing the envelope a bit
with the last two) - that really shouldn't be used anymore, since their
functionality has been subsumed by more complete scripting languages (AWK,
of course, but also perl, etc if you are so inclined).

--
Pensacola - the thinking man's drink.