[9fans] Mash

[brucee@plan9.bell-labs.com]

> Does that mean you haven't ported "mash" yet?  :-)  :-)  :-)
>
> I only browsed the mash documentation, but it seemed very intriguing.

Hi, I'm Bruce Ellis - a friend of Mark Shaney's - and
I wrote mash.  There was a plan to replace mk either
by adding loadable module support to rc or by more or
less a mash port.  It's syntax is almost identical to rc
though I got rid of the "if not" wart by some deft but
perhaps not totally successful changes.

I actually did the dynamic loader (with much encouragement
from Russ - loadable vga drivers would be nice) but had
too many other things on my plate to do the rest.
(This involved really minor changes to 8l and a small
library file - 240 lines.  I didn't do the other loaders.)

I wrote a paper on mash for Usenix but it was rejected,
though there were some very fine papers on web servers
and perl that could fill its place.  (Sarcasm?)
Maybe I should tidy up the draft and put it somewhere.
You may not understand it though - some of the reviewers
seemed to have trouble with it because it wasn't ksh/nmake.

Let me be naughty and share some of their comments.
Yes, this is so unprofessional.

---
I find nothing interesting or novel or conceptually
appealing about the paper.

[ok - more fool you]

The author states that "a history mechanism probably
doesn't belong in a shell."  Make and Tk do?

[they aren't in the shell boofhead, that's the point]

Is a 1978 AT&T manual the best reference on the C language?

[that's the C Reference Manual brainiac]

What is a "trampoline function"?

[where did you go to school]

On the second last page, you write "mush" instead of "must"

[it's a draft - meant "tush" anyway]

We hope to see you in Monterey!

[eat my shorts]
---

But I digress.  Mash is fun, makes Inferno a better place.
The make loadable module is 723 lines of code.  nmake
is 723 pages of code.

Comments/suggestions welcome - though I don't read 9fans,
Russ forwarded me the mail.

Bruce Ellis
Computing Prototypes Research Group
Bell Laboratories

* Don't meddle in the mouth.