From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-12-03T02:15:06+09:00
Subject: Re: calculations on lists of numbers

William James wrote:

> ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:
>> for years i've felt that i should be able to pipe numerical output into
>> some unix command like so
>>
>>    cat list | mean
>>    cat list | sum
>>    cat list | minmax
> 
> Why drag in the cat when it's utterly superfluous?
> 
>   mean <list
>   sum <list
>   minmax <list

Yes, true, but in a simple example like this, 'cat' is just a stand-in for
some other application that would stream the numbers. In such a case, the
pipe seems more appropriate.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com