Re: [bug-gawk] Feature request -- field indices for split

[fork]

Aharon Robbins <address@hidden> writes:

> 
> Hello.  Thank you for your mail.

> (I don't know what "ETL" means here.)

"Extract Transform Load" -- an acronym specifically designed to make a process
seem more complicated and fancier than it is.  Data munging, esp with SAS.

> As you point out, your requested feature is redundant with FIELDWIDTHS.
> I don't think this feature is used much as it is, and I am loathe to add
> yet another feature that almost noone will ever use.  Gawk already
> has too many of those, that seemed like good ideas at the time but
> in retrospect were not.

Of course that is a reasonable point of view, and I am not offering to submit a
patch (so I really have no ground to stand on), but ... it might be that
causality is mixed up here:  FIELDWIDTHS is not used as much as it should be
(possibly) because it is painful (oh the calculations! woe! woe!) to deal with,
and not because the use-case is wrong.  However,  my pet FIELDINDICES might
enable a swarm of new SAS programmers to use Gawk with much less friction.  And
there are LOTS of SAS programmers...

To see how SAS does it, look at item #2 here:

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sas/modules/input.htm

Also -- how would you determine whether a feature is used much or not?  Just
curious (ie not accusatory).

Thanks for your reply!