[Tutor] a big thank to all tutors and tutees

[Brian van den Broek]

Hi all,

I just now finished a first real and genuine to-do-some-actual-work 
program and I wanted to say thanks to those who ask and answer questions 
on tutor. I doubt I could have done it as easily or at all without what I 
have learned from the list.

Not that you need be, but in case you are interested in the nature of the 
program:

I am a graduate student in philosophy and am working for a professor 
assembling a 1000'ish page collection of articles for a book. Many people 
are going to read articles and type up plain text files of index entries 
with each line being a list of headings and subheadings followed by one or 
more page references.

What I wrote was a program to merge the various files, alphabetize the 
merged file by heading, merge lines with identical heading strings, sort 
the page references, and give it book-index formatting where it appears like:

A, 67, 78-82
<TAB>B, 81f
C, 89

where B is a subheading of A.

Also, the page reference sort needed to preserve a rudimentary markup 
coding and ignore '-mm' in 'nn-mm'.

All in all, no Fields Medal will be awarded, but it feels great to have 
created a real program to do real work.

So, thanks to everyone on the list.

Best,

Brian vdB