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Full Discussion: Should I say "field 8" or "column 8" in this case?
Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Should I say "field 8" or "column 8" in this case? Post 302784411 by drl on Friday 22nd of March 2013 07:13:15 AM
Old 03-22-2013
Hi.

Good topic. It may help all of us communicate better.

I tend to prefer the term fields when talking about variable-width data groups, and columns when considering fixed-width data. The article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(computer_science) pretty much describes my outlook. If there is a separator character or string, I'd call it variable-width, even if all of the members of a specific group are the same width, primarily because any member could become a different width in the future.

From a historical point of view, the FORTRAN influence caused people to describe data in terms of fields even though the data were in fixed-width. Only somewhat later, perhaps in the '70s or '80s would the idea of free-form data become more prevalent.

Thanks for starting the discussion ... cheers, drl
Last edited by drl; 03-22-2013 at 08:20 AM..
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

dadadodo

dadadodo(1)						      General Commands Manual						       dadadodo(1)

NAME

       dadadodo - exterminate all rational thought

SYNOPSIS

       dadadodo [ options ] [ input-files ]

DESCRIPTION

       dadadodo is a program that analyses texts for Markov chains of word probabilities and then generates random sentences based on those proba-
       bilities.  Sometimes these sentences are nonsense, but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter and reveal hidden  mean-
       ings.

OPTIONS

       dadadodo accepts the following options:

       -c, -count n
	      Generate n sentences.

       -h, -help
	      Show summary of options and exit.

       -html  Output HTML instead of plain text.

       -l, -load file
	      Load compiled data from file ('-' for standard input).

       -o, -output file
	      Save compiled data in file ('-' for standard output).

       -p, -pause s
	      Delay s seconds between paragraphs.

       -w, -columns columns
	      Format  output  for  a  device columns character cells in width.	If not specified, the value of the environment variable COLUMNS is
	      used to determine the width.  If that variable is not defined, a width of 72 is assumed.

NOTES

       Non-option arguments are input files.  These should be text files, but may be mail folders or HTML.  MIME messages  are	handled  sensibly.
       When  no  output  file is specified, sentences will be generated from the input data directly.  However, loading a saved file is far faster
       than re-parsing the text files each time.

ENVIRONMENT

       COLUMNS
	      Determines the width (in character cells) of the output if the -w, -columns option is not used.  If  not	set,  a  width	of  72	is
	      assumed.

SEE ALSO

       dadadodo's upstream website is http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/.

AUTHOR

       dadadodo was written by Jamie Zawinski.

       This manual page was written by Sudhakar Chandrasekharan <thaths@netscape.com>, based on the program's usage message.

																       dadadodo(1)
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