RE: [Fun With Perl] Everything should be kept as simple as possible...

[Larry Rosler <lr@hpl.hp.com>]

> From: Vicki Brown [mailto:vlb@cfcl.com]
> Sent: Thursday, June 17, 1999 23:07
> To: fwp@technofile.org
> Subject: Re: [Fun With Perl] Everything should be kept as simple as
> possible...
> 
> At 20:13 -0400 06/17/1999, Steve Willer wrote:
> >What is wrong with this?
> >
> >  cat names.txt|sed 's/||/, /g'|sort +0 +1
> 
> It's a Perl list :-)
> 
> Maybe he wanted something as part of other code...
> Maybe he's not on Unix (the question did come from the 
> MacPerl list :-)
> 
> >there's someting to be said for a nice, simple pipe. My single-line
pipe
> >does a more correct sort than the perl equivalents you posted because
it
> >sorts last name before first, rather than sorting the line as a
whole.
> 
> Given that the result is the same... why is this "more correct"? :)

Unfortunately, the result is *not* the same.  You, and your reviewers,
MJD and Randal, have completely missed the point (and missed the boat).

Because of the position of the last-name delimiter '|', in the ASCII
character set, any pair of lines for which the first fields (the last
names) are identical except that one is a leading substring of the other
will sort in the wrong order.

print sort "John||Elton\n", "Johnson||Lyndon\n";

Shame on all of you!  :-)

Everything should be kept as simple as possible... but no simpler.  Use
the Schwartz, Randal et al!

-- 
Larry Rosler
Hewlett-Packard Company
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Larry_Rosler/
lr@hpl.hp.com 

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