From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Subject: Re: [9fans] v8 shell From: John Murdie To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Cc: john@cs.york.ac.uk In-Reply-To: References: Content-Type: text/plain Message-Id: <1068811476.1516.15.camel@pc118> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 12:04:36 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 898067dc-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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