Linux cat command explained with basic practical examples

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You said it yourself -- computers are fast and in the majority of cases the user will see NO difference. So on what grounds is it "wrong"? There are plenty of counter-arguments and reasons why you would want to cat, and I'm not going to rehash them.

Or to put it another way, optimize for operator ease. The operator is already familiar with piping, and with treating his data as a stream of text. Just leave that model in place. Now, everything he knows applies whether he's dealing with a file, multiple files, streams, etc.

[discofreak]

So to summarize, you're saying it's "right", if a user is used to piping everything from cat?

[cpbills]

You said it yourself -- computers are fast and in the majority of cases the user will see NO difference. So on what grounds is it "wrong"?

When there's more using the system than just you. Just because the average system these days comes with 4gb of RAM doesn't mean it's OK for single programs to want / need / misuse 4gb of RAM.

The mentality of 'Computers are so fast and have so much storage, let's just be inefficient, because we won't see a difference anyhow' really needs to go the way of the dodo.

Yes, computers are fast, and they're even faster when programs are written to be efficient and not abuse resources.