[conspire] more re touchscreen / tablet style scrolling and touchpad manipulation

[Nick Moffitt]

Tony Godshall:
> awk syntax argued to be better than if(){}else{}?

To be clear, awk supports exactly the if(){}else{} syntax you list here.

> // better than m{} ?

I won't argue the relative merits: PCRE is clearly The Best Regex
Syntax, but POSIX RE does pretty well.

> And what if you have to match paths, hmmm?  do you enjoy
> slanty-stick-land?

Setting FS to '/' lets you treat path sub-components as columns, if
that's your thing.  I do that occasionally when using Dan Egnor's
xml2/html2 tools.

> I've long been convinced perl is a better awk than awk, a better sed
> than sed, and a better grep than grep.  

I find awk's base-case expressiveness helpful in a thinking-in-sets
query/response model.  It's the same reason you still use SQL instead of
laboriously iterating through lists of objects yourself.

> Doesn't mean you should use it for actual programming tho.

No of course not.  That's why we have Python (among other languages).

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