This does sound truly awful! If we're going for a truly minimal, Unix-style, modular program though, why not abandon the focus on lines and have it operate onl

This does sound truly awful! If we're going for a truly minimal, Unix-style, modular program though, why not abandon the focus on lines and have it operate only on a single character? You could have it accept text as a parameter, and return the edited text as the result so then you could write multi-character strings by piping together multiple invocations of the program!