From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Stalker To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-reply-to: <607fb38c-9095-4045-abbb-28fa454184aa@l38g2000vba.googlegroups.com> References: <607fb38c-9095-4045-abbb-28fa454184aa@l38g2000vba.googlegroups.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <2447.1238697675.1@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 19:41:15 +0100 Message-Id: <20090402184115.BEA14865B@okapi.maths.tcd.ie> Subject: Re: [9fans] what features would you like in a shell? Topicbox-Message-UUID: d0de7f1c-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > so I'm writing to get your opinions. maybe there are thing that people > implement themselves but want included in the shell itself? or just > something they want implemented? What I most often miss in shell programming is a proper type system. Bourne basically only has strings. Rc improves matters slightly with lists of strings. It's still not enough for me. I make a lot of mistakes in shell programming and strict type checking would catch most of them. I'm not sure I would use a strictly typed shell exclusively, but I would certainly like to have it available. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282