On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, ES wrote:

> I'd rather not, thanks. It takes about one minute to start up vi and save
> the file afterwards. You can also use it again tomorrow.

Ah, but one minute is far too long. You see One Liners are developed 
iteratively and incrementally on the command line.

Each attempt piping in the data from STDIN, letting the output go to 
STDOUT for instant display.

You have the editing power of GNU ReadLine and up arrow, and simply Enter 
to execute.

Instantaneous feedback.

Tiny steps incremental development. You never just stuck saying "Why 
didn't that massive regex work?"

When it is working you pipe the output to the destination file.

Then you stash the oneliner for future reference ever with
   echo 'one liner' > file
or cut and paste into vi/emacs/...

I bind Emacs M-x compile to F12, and often develope one liners there.

> This was interesting to me, though: "Can we command line option an idiom?".
> Can we, instead, idiom the CLI?

Ah. Theres a thought. We need the notion of Pipes and filters in ruby 
shell.



John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch                Email : john.carter / tait.co.nz
New Zealand

Refactorers do it a little better every time.