dear mr. fromme ---
i thank you for your thoughts and the time you took to "pen" them.
my thesis was in regard to the documentation_set for sh(1).
what i said about my "killer_app"
was an effort to describe my motivation for examining that set.
while it was not my intention to
seek advice regarding the development of my prototype,
i appreciate your efforts, on my behalf, and will respond to them,
in addition to your thesis_related comments.
hear !
oddly enough, i thought of this approach first [ great minds think alike ].
i rejected it because of the work involved to create work_arounds;
i already did the filter thing:
foo=`echo FreeBSD | right_all_but_n 4 | left_n 3`
or
foo=`echo FreeBSD | right 3`
where "left_n", "right_n", "left_all_but_n" and "right_all_but_n" are
compiled, c_language filters, which take the character_count as an argument.
i may end_up using it, for now, because it works and it is "intuitively obvious".
long_term, however, i will reject it, because it forks a child.
additionally, the use of dd(1), especially for my target user_base,
violates a corollary of my stated commandment,
which i did not state originally, but, which i will state here:
thou shalt not be clever.
some folks see commandments as "negative rights".
a "positive rights" variant would be:
thou shalt be intuitively_obvious to even the most dis_interested reader;
see note [c].
"abuse", to me, is a subjective term, because
sh(1) "kinda is" and "kinda isn't" a programming language.
it has an intended purpose, but, it will do many other things, as well.
when i discovered python, about eight or nine years ago, i got really excited.
it would have been my first choice, for many reasons, but,
i was forced to reject it because it violates another commandment:
thou shalt not preclude the use of arbitrary white_space between tokens.
my writing_style violates ...
