Jon Skeet wrote:
I'd personally be willing to sacrifice a certain amount of compactness for the sake of readability, but obviously if we can get the size down a bit*without* losing readability, that would be good.
Yes. Readability is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, and the proposed zgrep -i format wasn't my first choice: it evolved over some time as I used it to look at a lot of data. To some extent the format is aimed at my needs, and may be less suited for novices. For example: TZ="America/Phoenix" - - -072818 LMT 1883-11-18 12 -07 MST 1918-03-31 03 -06 MDT 1 1918-10-27 01 -07 MST 1919-03-30 03 -06 MDT 1 1919-10-26 01 -07 MST 1942-02-09 03 -06 MWT 1 1943-12-31 23:01 -07 MST 1944-04-01 01:01 -06 MWT 1 1944-09-30 23:01 -07 MST 1967-04-30 03 -06 MDT 1 1967-10-29 01 -07 MST Here the columns don't line up and although this may be a bit offputting for some, for me it's a plus as it causes the unusual WWII non-hour transitions to stand out. Also, it's easier to visually identify the daylight-saving transitions via "1" vs nothing, than to scan through a column saying "isdst=1" vs "isdst=0". In contrast: America/Phoenix Initially: -07:28:18 standard LMT 1883-11-18 19:00:00Z -07:00:00 standard MST 1918-03-31 09:00:00Z -06:00:00 daylight MDT 1918-10-27 08:00:00Z -07:00:00 standard MST 1919-03-30 09:00:00Z -06:00:00 daylight MDT 1919-10-26 08:00:00Z -07:00:00 standard MST 1942-02-09 09:00:00Z -06:00:00 daylight MWT 1944-01-01 06:01:00Z -07:00:00 standard MST 1944-04-01 07:01:00Z -06:00:00 daylight MWT 1944-10-01 06:01:00Z -07:00:00 standard MST 1967-04-30 09:00:08Z -06:00:00 daylight MDT 1967-10-29 08:00:00Z -07:00:00 standard MST Although this conveys the same information, it's harder to catch anomalies, as the nicely-aligned columns and data tend to blur into each other. For example, it's hard to spot the error that I deliberately introduced into the penultimate line of that data, whereas the same error would have been much easier to see in zgrep -i format.