Column-wise maths (sum-product?)

[ebay]

Column-wise maths (sum-product?)

[jondegenhardt]

The specific example you listed can be handled pretty easily using awk. More generally though, none of the tsv-utilities tools provides a way to generate new values with mathematical expressions, or in the case of tsv-filter, the ability to filter rows based on a mathematical formula. The general reason I haven't introduced such facilities is that I haven't found a way to do this without essentially recreating significant parts of awk. awk is a great tool, there's no reason to rebuild it. I have a couple ideas on this front, but nothing I'm likely to get to soon.

[Llammissar]

Embarrassingly, I've barely used awk for anything, and simply didn't think to reach for it. I spent a few minutes playing and the result was substantially better, so I can see your point. Didn't really help the column naming, but that's a smaller issue.

In the long term, I think there are things that would be nice to have in this general category, but agree that it's not an especially high priority.

[jondegenhardt]

One of the reasons I wrote these tools is that awk, powerful as it is, becomes error prone to write as soon as things get at all complicated. And, it is possible to get a large portion of the power by providing a set of much simpler and less error prone primitives. An important part of the intent of these tools.

But, for general mathematical manipulation, it seems hard to create a language that is significantly simpler than awk, or at least that's my feeling for now.