Ruby does awk for the most part. I can't comment on strength since awk has a small footprint compared to both ruby and perl clocking in just under 96k. Also bot

Ruby does awk for the most part. I can't comment on strength since awk has a small footprint compared to both ruby and perl clocking in just under 96k. Also both emacs and ed are descendants of TECO =) The editors have had major impact on our languages mainly because regular expressions, called regular sets at the time, where implemented in Thompson's ed which was based on an earlier line editor implementation called qed used on ctss and multics. One can follow the evolution almost in dialect fairly well. ed -> grep -> sed -> awk ed -> em -> ex -> vi awk -> perl -> ruby so ed -> grep -> sed -> awk -> perl -> ruby The right tool for the right job when all you know is a chainsaw everything looks like a hammer unix process are cheap and all that yada yada philosophical paradigmy finite state automata pipelines vs pointers vs classes vs recursive enumeration iterative parenthesis backtick mind expansions expression logic =P