Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Rick Hohensee <humbubba@smarty.smart.net>]

>
> I believe - if you think my opinion is relevant about a program I wrote
> 15 years ago but haven't used much for the last 7 or 8 - that sam has
> two major advantages:
>
> 1) Structural regular expressions, and the command language that
> 	derives from them.
> 2) Sam -r
>
> Advantage 1) feels cool and makes a difference when you're working
> on a problem; advantage 2) is the deep, structural improvement that
> trumps all else.
>
> -rob
>

Illiterate translation: it escapes the infuriating line-wiseness of the
ed-family text utils. Hoo Ray. Huzzah.

Quibble:
 It doesn't quite fully supplant ed for me, unfortunately. It doesn't work
(that I know of) on binary files. It elides zero-bytes. My dotted-dir
thing for Linux directory names is dependant on an ed script that converts
e.g. /bin/ to /.bi/, that I can run on _anything_ uncompressed. I have sam
(just the command language part)  in my base install stuff though , which
is under 40 meg, in addition to ed.  Please take that as high praise.

Rick Hohensee
		www.clienux.com