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To:	culliton@srg.af.mil (Tom Culliton x2278)
cc:	rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu
Subject: Re: Another little challenge 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 25 Jun 92 20:31:25 EDT."
             <9206252031.aa11853@ceres.srg.af.mil> 
Date:	Thu, 25 Jun 1992 22:34:11 -0400
From:	Scott Schwartz <schwartz@groucho.cs.psu.edu>
Message-Id: <92Jun25.223439edt.2536@groucho.cs.psu.edu>


| # This code can be fooled by really pathological cases involving embedded
| # newlines followed by either 'fn ' or '='.  Fixing this is left as an
| # exercise for the reader. ;-)  It's already slow enough for me.

Here's where Unix really loses: malappropriate delimiters all over the
place.  If "whatis" would print an \0 between entries, you could use
that to split them.  That assumes ifs can deal with \0, and that \0
won't otherwise appear in the output from whatis. (ifs='' seems to work;
probably as a side effect of nul terminated strings.)  Lisp really wins
because the read primative can properly interpret whatever the write
primative generates.