"Simple" but non-portable == useless.

[Tom Christiansen]

Gods, it's not enough that I should kill the guy -- two people have
actually *MAILED* me his last posting.  ***Sigh.***

Ok, here are the problems with the Dan's latest round of pipes:

1) It runs considerably slower (percentage-wise) than the perl version 
   in both system and user times.  Witness:

    $ time perl clash.tom > /dev/null
        5.286052 real        2.546462 user        2.135102 sys
    $ time csh -f clash.dan > /dev/null
        8.468490 real        4.665696 user        3.077168 sys

2) It doesn't list where the collisions occur, which 
   was, after all, my goal in writing it in the first place.

3) It screws up on pathological filenames.

4) It gets some things truly wrong: 

   6 -rwxr--r--  1 tchrist      4542 Mar  4  1990 /mnt/tchrist/scripts/errlogd
   6 -rwxr--r--  1 root         4865 Nov 19 16:58 /usr/adm/bin/errlogd

   There's no collision there -- I can't execute the one in /usr/adm/bin
   even with that in my path.  Dan's version thinks I can, whereas mine 
   and Randal's and Chip's all know better.  I didn't check the TCL version.

I can't figure out what to do with this thread.  I really wish it would
die.  [So don't post to it, Tom.  Yeah, yeah.]  I readily agree that it's
cluttering this newsgroup.  I'm going to send it to alt.religion.computers, 
since it's basically a religious issue, so doesn't belong in comp.lang.perl;
sending it there would be like arguing whether women should exist in
soc.women -- none too cool.  If they don't like it there, they can redirect
to alt.flame, I guess.  There is actually a thread going there in 
alt.religion.computers already about the pipes vs programming approach.

--tom

PS:  Go check out comp.org.usenix for Lori's amusing contest posting.  
--
"Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el?  Now
 he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he
 always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen <tchrist at convex.com>)