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I did this because it runs significantly faster with relatively extra complexity. It's useful for quickly generating test data etc

Thanks for the link. That was what I was thinking about when writing my response about "complex code to do trivial things is kind of a meme." but i couldn't find it.

Is this for legal or product reasons or both? It’s hard to tell from the link.

Legal reasons; it's in a section titled "Legal Issues". The idea is if you're cloning an existing program, it needs to be clear that you're not copying code from the original. This may be less of an issue with the other free implementations we have now, but a lot of these were clones of proprietary UNIX programs, and then it's really important that you can tell it's not derived from the proprietary version.

Got it, thanks for the explanation and context