On: LINQ Ruined My Favorite Interview Question

[mzs]

Ooh that's a clever use of reshape, but wrong sadly. Yet you're right I could make it simpler, it was just what came first to mind, I did not even check it. Imagine typical sentences:

  $ echo Foo foo foo. | rs -T
  Foo
  foo
  foo.

  $ echo Foo foo foo. | tr 'a-z' 'A-Z' | sed 's/[^A-Z]/\
  /g' | grep -v '^$'
  FOO
  FOO
  FOO

Also the link mentioned using wiki articles for testing, so they would have paragraphs and that's where reshape shines for things like emails, but fails here:

  $ cat foo
  Foo
  
  foo

  foo.
  $ <foo rs -T
  Foo   foo   foo.  
  $ <foo tr 'a-z' 'A-Z' | sed 's/[^A-Z]/\
  /g' | grep -v '^$'
  FOO
  FOO
  FOO

That that's though makes me think, should I treat contractions special? What about plurals? It's starting to get silly now.

[stass → mzs]

I think it goes beyond the original question now. :) If one wants to do proper thing, then definitely contractions, word variations, etc should be considered. For this, I guess something like OpenNLP can be used.

What's interesting though is how UNIX shell, being essentially a symbolic FP language, allows one to solve the problem in a clear and concise way. And if one desires, the program can be easily modified to read sentences, say, from network from ssh tunneled via HTTPS. That kind of flexibility can rarely be achieved in languages like C# with tight coupling between the units of abstraction.