Re: rc futures

[Byron Rakitzis <byron@rakitzis.com>]

A couple of comments, not exhaustive:

> 12. Extra parentheses around `~' and `!' are syntax errors (you'll
> have to get rc-1.6b2 to see what this is about).  I suspect that these
> "surprising" special cases can be fixed with minor tweaks to the
> grammar.  (Suggestion due to Bengt Kleberg.)

They are not syntax errors -- 

	; while ((~ 1 1) && (~ 2 2)) {}
	~ not found

Parentheses introduce a word list -- a command list is introduced
with {}. Thus:

	; while ({! 1 1} && {! 2 2}) {}
	1 not found
	2 not found
	1 not found
	2 not found
	1 not found
	2 not found

Maybe I don't understand the nature of the complaint.

> 16. Make `*' match files beginning with `.' (except `.' and `..', of
> course).  This is something of a religious question, but my feeling is
> that special treatment of "dot files" is a mistake.  (Suggestion ditto.)

I'm really unsure about the justification for this. This breaks
compatability with so many versions of Unix that it really makes me
wonder what the point is. Just because plan 9 doesn't have dotfiles
doesn't necessarily mean we want to foist this on Unix users of rc.

> 23. Dynamically load readline only when rc is about to read from a
> terminal device.  This would mean that a single rc binary would be
> lean and fast for scripts, but still do readline for interactive use.
> However, I suspect that the effort involved in making this happen
> portably would be considerable.

I don't even know what to say about this. The mind boggles. The idea that
the readline library is so cumbersome that it needs to be dynamically
loaded really weirds me out. Is it that huge now? Processors have improved
by a couple orders of magnitude since I wrote rc! What if a talented
programmer spent a month doing a readline replacement?  Could he make
it weigh in at 10% of the size of GNU readline? 5%?  1%?

Sorry, it's late here and I'm babbling.

Byron.