just as an aside, you never know how your code might be used. this more often exposes bugs for unplanned events. but sometimes ...
awk is my favorite language for simple stuff. if you don't know it was developed by alfred Aho, peter Weinberger and brian Kernighan, hence it's name, in the 1970s. i think it's the granddaddy of all scripting languages.
it was intended as just another tool in a unix pipe and didn't support user defined functions until a user came in with a page long awk program.
i thought i had read that their collection jaws (A, W and K) dropped to the floor because the had never considered it being used that way.
BTW, brian kernighan has co-authored a number of books covering a not so trivial set of topic including software tools, the unix programming language. but the Practice of Programming kinda went back to basics (see table of contents) starting with names of variables
I got a used VIC-20 in 83 and paid $35 for Swedish Human Engineered Software Forth79 on a game cart. Then I bought Starting Forth. In 3 months I learned so much, it changed my view of programming.
Forth was the revolution back then. I remember seeing a demo of a user-written Forth program running real time 3d wire frame animation on an Apple II. In those days, that was quite a deal. Then, the only alternatives were, you could run the same program at 1/20th speed in BASIC, or spend half a year writing it in assembler.
I had a TI9914 graphics card grafted on to my OSI Superboard II 6502 machine, wrote a Forth display library for it. It rocked.
Reminds me about my previous job. I was replacing one that should leave that company. He have written tons of PHP code with variables like $a, $b... No comments what the code was doing. All comments was older code not longer in use.
