> but forcing compability seems worse. where are these decisions > centralized? how do you change decisions? can you override > these decisions (cast)? how does the output of, say, awk get > typed?
The output of awk is a byte stream, same as its input. The same holds for any program. If you want to give it some other type then you need at least a casting mechanism. You probably also want a splitting mechanism, with a regular expression for the field separator. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282
