Re: ugh, but yay

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

 > From: Brian <http://www.cs..edu/~b>
 > Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2021 07:35:59 -0800
 >
 > I did some programming for BJC, to make a glossary and index by scraping 
 > the pages.  I (blush) wrote it in C, because I don't know how to do file 
 > I/O in any good language (double blush).  And my code sucks.  (Triple 
 > blush.)  It barely works.  (Just like the WAITS mail program, Mike and 
 > Marty and Matt and whoever else remembers WAITS.)  Like, when I find a 
 > string to index, I convert it to lower case unless the second letter is 
 > upper case, like "ADT" (abstract data type), or the string is "Boolean." 
 >   But sometimes it's something like "abstract data type (ADT)", so 
 > really I have to traverse the string looking at each word to catch 
 > acronyms.  Makes me wish I'd written it in  Logo!  I probably 
 > could have.

I probably would've done this in Perl.  I don't recommend learning Perl,
'tho, since it takes syntactic sugar to entirely quite bitter level.

Probably Python would've been easier than C.  Admittedly, Python is not as
powerful for I/O stuff as Perl or C, but it's doable and would've been
less ugly than C (or Perl, for that matter).

I guess you could've also done it in Awk.  I do a lot of awk one-liners
these days.  Not sure about scraping web pages, 'tho.