Understanding the Bourne Shell (was Re: Finding the last arg)
Ronald S H Khoo
ronald at robobar.co.uk
Sat Jan 12 12:22:25 AEST 1991
allbery at ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:
> There is one other problem. I daresay it would be possible to make Bourne
> shell syntax a bit more "regular" by using a yacc grammar. THIS WON'T WORK!
> At least, not without making the shell much less useful
Well, the some of the chaps at research seem to be quite happy with "rc"
and that's got a yacc grammar... Apparently it was too painful to
port /bin/sh to Plan 9 so Duff wrote "rc". (He presented a paper on it
to the UKUUG Summer Conference last year)
rc has exactly what you describe -- a regularised /bin/sh syntax.
And of course, since they use Gnots running Pike's windowing stuff, no
command line history/editing or anything like that in rc, it's just a shell,
and looks quite nice too. Pity it's not available.
--
ronald at robobar.co.uk +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)
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