a perl question

[RW]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2011 08:05:14 -0800
Chip Camden <sterling at camdensoftware.com> wrote:

> Quoth Chad Perrin on Tuesday, 04 January 2011:

> > The weirdest thing about most useless uses of cat is that not using
> > cat would actually be a little clearer and involve fewer keystrokes
> > -- as in this case.
> > 

> I blame OOP.  Programmer thinks about the data stream before they
> think about the process.  It's a nouns-first orientation.

You might easily get the same prejudice from data flow diagrams - or
plumbing. 

Personally I find that using cat makes things simpler and less error
prone when reusing  pipelines in shell history.

For example it's easier to edit 

     cat file | foo

into 
   
     cat file | bar | foo
or   cat file? | foo

than editing 

     foo < file

into

     bar < file | foo
or   cat file? | foo