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To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 12 Jan 2020 12:44:30 -0800."
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Comments: In-reply-to Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>
 message dated "Sun, 12 Jan 2020 12:44:30 -0800."
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Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2020 13:41:45 -0800
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Subject: Re: [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors)
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On Sun, 12 Jan 2020 12:44:30 -0800 Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> I wasn't being snarky.  You said
>
>   "The output is seen as truth because the representation is for some
>   reason too hard to get at or too hard to cascade through the system."
>
> I honestly have no idea what that means.
>
> Likewise, 
>
>   "There's a total comedy of work going on in the unix way of
>   a wc pipeline versus calling a length function on a list."
>
> I just don't know what you mean.

May be this is not what Kevin meant but the way I interpreted
his message: smushing everything down to strings for output as
in unix pipelines loses any underlying structure which then
may have to be rediscovered by the next program in the
pipeline by parsing. This is slower, indirect and errorprone.
If one can communicate a structured representation of data between
components that would be better.