Re: [9fans] v8 shell

[John Murdie <john@cs.york.ac.uk>]

On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 00:43, rog@vitanuova.com wrote:
> > like many people, I haven't been able to face the terminal moraine of rc, to get
> > to the mountain tops behind it. If only there was a budget for clue, and a
> > market for selling it in this area.
>
> erm, rc is dead easy...  much easier, in fact than the bourne shell
> (let alone all those unix abortions).
>
> the only (and crucial) thing that's really different is the fact that
> variables are (single level) lists.  this means you're no longer at
> the mercy of space-based tokenisation every time you use a $var
> expansion.  more-or-less everything else boils down to sugary
> syntactic differences.
>
> rc makes for a much more reliable scripting language.
>
> i can't really see why anyone would want to go back to the bourne
> shell when it's so fundamentally error-prone.

I agree with your conclusions, but I also like rc's use of \ for hiding
a new-line only, and rc's much simpler quoting rule - just one type of
quote ('), and double it for a literal quote. (The number of times I've
felt obliged to write a script with Bourne shell for portability to the
Linux world, only to get bogged down in quoted-quoted strings.) Ugh.

I always write rc shell scripts for my own use, these days - Plan 9 or
Unix. I find the minor differences between TD's original and Byron's
flattery are annoying, however. Will they ever be reconciled?

John A. Murdie
Department of Computer Science
University of York