Re: TIL about string-rectangle

[Tim Landscheidt <tim@tim-landscheidt.de>]

Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

>> For complex sorts, I once wrote a function that enhances
>> sort-regexp-fields (and needs a docstring and comments that
>> I could understand after eight years): ...

> Thanks. I've used the Unix sort(1) command for a few decades now. It's
> kind of burned into my brain. I know Emacs Lisp is exceedingly
> powerful (I used it as my Lisp interpreter as the one and only Lisp
> class I took), but sort(1) does just what I wanted here other than not
> terminating the third (year) field at the comma. It's kind of hard to
> argue with its economy. Regular expressions are quite handy, but also
> pretty verbose for this task.

No doubt.  For me, it's the other way round: Whenever
"sort", "sort -n" or "sort -h" is not sufficient, I (usual-
ly) resort to Emacs or Perl.  I have looked at sort's -k
option a thousand times and never used it successfully.

Tim