a dessert on a table, is also a trifle, which is part sponge cake, which is a flour/butter/egg/sugar mix which is a starch/fat/binding/sweetner and that lets you rebuild it either as swapping the trifle out at your dinner party, or swapping the sponge out for biscuits in the trifle, or swapping the butter for margarine in the sponge recipe. (I suspect that's a part of general thinking being able to see the same thing in different overlapping contexts which let you take it apart at different size boundaries e.g. treating CSVs as lines of text in one context, then comma separated text, then comma separated dates and numbers and text, then entries in a user database, that lets you do different kind of processing on the same data where someone who sees it only as 'a CSV' is more restricted. IDEs let you treat it as functions, methods, classes, headers.Īnd the more of them you can see, the more tools you can use - e.g. Structure editors let you treat it as INI blocks, key=value pairs, XML trees. Regexes let you treat it as character sequences, arbitrary sequences of patterns, repeating patterns. Vim uses it in letting you treat it as lines, words, sentences, paragraphs, blocks, screens.

I now think that being able to interpret the same thing in many ways, and shift between them at will to use the most useful one or leverage a different tool, is a key skill in computing and programming which doesn't get discussed all that often. Is just one way to view it, but only 'correct' as far as saying agrees with the author's intent, but not objectively 'more correct'. It was a surprise to me to really understand that text files don't consist of lines anywhere, they are byte arrays.

Instal EZ Meta Tag Editor 3.2.0.1