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

[Arnold Robbins]

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 think it's pretty fair to say that AT&T concentrated on the user-level
stuff through V.2, while UCB concentrated on the kernel level stuff
through 4.3.
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