From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Rick Hohensee Message-Id: <200107190320.XAA13519@smarty.smart.net> Subject: Re: [9fans] sam vs acme To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu In-Reply-To: <20010718235706.235C4199EA@mail.cse.psu.edu> from "rob pike" at Jul 18, 2001 07:57:01 PM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 23:20:58 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: d0c8902c-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > > 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