Bourne shell history (was Re: Finding the last arg)

[Michael Meissner]

In article <317 at audfax.audiofax.com> arnold at audiofax.com (Arnold Robbins) writes:

| In article <1991Jan9.215829.9890 at usenet.ins.cwru.edu> chet at po.CWRU.Edu writes:
| >Another thing new with the V.2 shell that I forgot to mention is the source
| >conversion from `Bournegol' to C.
| 
| And, boy, did it make a difference!  A quantum leap in readability and
| maintainability (and therefore modifiability) of the shell.  It seems to me
| that at about V.2 AT&T got serious, and went through *everything*, formatting
| the C code, regularizing argument parsing via getopt, and so on.

I seem to remember that people were saying that the C version of the
shell was much faster in doing shell scripts then the Bournegol
version, though I suspect the real win was caused by not exec-ing test
and echo.  My .profile seems to do a zillion if's and such, and it was
MUCH faster using a modern shell (System V.2 /bin/sh, ksh, or bash)
than the tired old V7 shell (which Ultrix shipped as /bin/sh).
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?