Tool -flag considered harmful (was: grep replacement)

[Andrew Klossner]

[]

	"I've yet to hear an argument here against putting the context
	function into grep other than weak bleatings of parsimony."

How about "because the people writing the tool think it doesn't
belong."  This strikes me as a strong argument.  If you have a
contrasting vision of what a pattern matcher can be, implement it
yourself; don't go beating on a toolmaker who isn't responsible to you.
(I'll admit that some of the beating is appropriate because Andrew
asked for comments, but this lambasting of his philosophy is out of
line.)

I think the exciting part of Andrew's announcement about gre (NOT
grep!) is that the sophisticated pattern matching code will be
encapsulated into library routines.  The gre utility itself will just
be a wrapper.  Those of us tool builders who can make slingshots but
aren't good enough to make scalpels will be able to produce whatever we
think a pattern matching tool should be, since the hard part will be
done and packaged for us.  (Of course, none of us peons outside the
Labs will ever see this, unless they export it via the Toolkit.)

I have worked in software foundries where tool-building consisted of
library routine building, not filter process building, and I found it
to be a more powerful, more easily exploited approach to the crafting
of wonderful programs.  I like a locally-developed tool called
"paragrep" which searches (English text) paragraphs instead of lines.
It was written by a C novice, thanks to the re_comp/re_exec library
routines.

  -=- Andrew Klossner   (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew)       [UUCP]
                        (andrew%tekecs.tek.com at relay.cs.net)   [ARPA]