This is an attempt to re-implement ye old favorite cat in an effort to learn a thing or three.

This project uses poetry to manage itself.

• this is a really naive implementation, and I mean that all of this is sitting in a big for-loop in one function. my original thought was to make one function for each flag, but then how would I deal with combinations of flags? maybe I need to build a function for each flag that returns a list of strings, and pass that to a function that prints to stdout? then it feels like an order-of-operations kind-of-problem, which could be more approachable?

• yep, breaking out input mutations was the right choice (at least it looks that way so far). the path taken is:

  • loop over files passed
  • for each file, progressively modify the input in-place (overwrite the input with the new state) based on flags passed

• figuring out how to deal with nonprintables is hard. Thought it'd be easier by using repr(char), but no such luck. currently looking at existing implementations to see what I can learn:

  • from bat
  • from cat