Re: Historical question on y command

That is pretty incredible to have someone who helped originally develop sed. You give a valuable perspective about sed. Thank you for clearing up some of the history, and setting the record straight.
 

 I have no idea about the history of the y command. FWIW, I wrote the following lines concerning the y command:
 

 y is a poor substitute for the Unix 'tr' command, because y does not use character classes (such as '0-9' or [:alpha:]). For complex sed scripts, y is often necessary. But a more practical approach is usually to use short sed scripts from within a shell script, along with tr and other Unix commands.
 

 I have sometimes wondered why y was called y. My suggestion is that it stands for "why". In many years of using sed, thousands of (admittedly utilitarian) sed scripts, I doubt I have ever used y.
 

 Daniel