From: ES <ruby-ml@...>
Date: 2005-03-08T12:30:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Challenge for the Day - One Liners

On Tue, March 8, 2005 2:20 am, John Carter said:
> On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, ES wrote:
>
>> I'd rather not, thanks. It takes about one minute to start up vi and save
>> the file afterwards. You can also use it again tomorrow.
>
> Ah, but one minute is far too long. You see One Liners are developed
> iteratively and incrementally on the command line.
>
> Each attempt piping in the data from STDIN, letting the output go to
> STDOUT for instant display.
>
> You have the editing power of GNU ReadLine and up arrow, and simply Enter
> to execute.
>
> Instantaneous feedback.
>
> Tiny steps incremental development. You never just stuck saying "Why
> didn't that massive regex work?"
>
> When it is working you pipe the output to the destination file.

I don't know.. I tend to think that if one needs to think about it,
it's probably not a one-liner (like, say, 'find / -iname '???.c*'').

> Then you stash the oneliner for future reference ever with
>    echo 'one liner' > file
> or cut and paste into vi/emacs/...
>
> I bind Emacs M-x compile to F12, and often develope one liners there.
>
>> This was interesting to me, though: "Can we command line option an idiom?".
>> Can we, instead, idiom the CLI?
>
> Ah. Theres a thought. We need the notion of Pipes and filters in ruby
> shell.

I think an actual Ruby shell (wrt. bash/csh/etc.) has been discussed before.
I wouldn't discount that idea.

> John Carter

E