RE: seq feature: print letters

[William Bader]

> Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 12:32:48 -0500
> From: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: seq feature: print letters
> CC: address@hidden
>
> On 01/26/2015 03:39 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> >>> On 25/01/15 05:10, Assaf Gordon wrote:
>
> >>>> I'm thinking that perhaps it would be better not to include this in 'coreutils', and instead put it in another, separate project.
> >>>> This way, there's no worries about adding bloat to coreutils, while being more flexible in adding other features (like additional character sets from latest unicode).

I think that bloat is an important issue.  Systems with limited resources need to run coreutils.  Would a smart watch need to print a sequence of letters to run?

Adding letters creates issues with loading unicode character set tables and creeping featurism if later seq needs to implement all of the listing methods common in word processors (upper case, lower case, what happens after z, roman numerals, etc.)

It breaks the unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.

If you need a sequence with letters, you can always use another filter to convert numbers to letters, for example,

seq 1 10 | awk -e '{ printf "%c\n", ($1+64) }'

or

seq 1 10 | perl -e 'use strict; use locale; while (<>) { printf "%s\n", chr($_ + ord("a") - 1); }'

or

 seq 1 10 | perl -e 'use strict; use Roman; while (<>) { printf "%s\n", Roman($_); }'

William