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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 11:46:29 -0400
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Subject: Re: Computer Language Shootout
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Date: 2003-07-21T11:46:29-04:00
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Samuel Tardieu wrote:
> But I still think that in a vast majority of cases, it is a good thing
> that users ask themselves "what is the biggest line length I will ever
> get?" and write such a function only if they really need to.

No, it is a terrible thing. To this day, I cannot open up a large
xterm on my Sun workstation and run "vi". It tells me "Screen too
large for internal buffer". UNIX utilities used to be full of such
line limits until the GNU folks came along and eliminated them from
their versions of the programs. Many of the old utilities would
silently truncate long lines, or consider them to be multiple lines,
or crash.

I have had the experience of needing to run text utilities on an
ordinary text file which happened to have lines which were several
hundred thousand characters long. No utility author would ever have
specified such a large limit.