Re: [TUHS] Tech Sq elevator (Was: screen editors)

[Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>]

Bakul Shah writes:
> 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.

Ah.  So lines IS the structure that a lot of people want.  As I just
said in a post, the JSON tools are a good example of communicating
structured data although I would have done them differently.

Jon