Inquiry about functional command shells

John Lacey lacey at batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu
Sat Jul 29 04:15:47 AEST 1989


This coming fall I am going to embark on a programming project to build a
UNIX shell based on a functional programming paradigm.  My initial
inclination is to build the shell from a Lisp interpreter/compiler---options
so far include MIT Scheme, Yale T, and perhaps XScheme or the recently
mentioned ELK embedded Scheme.

The main purpose is to combine the command and programming languages of the
environment into a single system.  That is, the shell language would not
only be similar to the programming language, it would _be_ the programming
language.

So far, I have found several references to similar projects, and I would
like to find further references, as well as any comments about the project
or the language that anyone might have.

The most promising reference that I have is

	_fsh - A Functional UNIX Command Interpreter_, 
	by Chris S. McDonald
	Univ. of Western Australia

It appeared in Software: Practice and Experience, 17 (10) 685-700 (1987).
If anyone knows more about this project, or has used a similar shell, I
would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

Thanks,

-- 
John Lacey                      |     cornell!batcomputer!lacey
lacey at tcgould.tn.cornell.edu    |     lacey at crnlthry.bitnet



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