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: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <4402.1239052698.1@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 22:18:18 +0100 Message-Id: <20090406211818.C2B34865B@okapi.maths.tcd.ie> Subject: Re: [9fans] typed sh (was: what features would you like in a shell?) Topicbox-Message-UUID: d3ab556c-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > but forcing compability seems worse. where are these decisions > centralized? how do you change decisions? can you override > these decisions (cast)? how does the output of, say, awk get > typed? The output of awk is a byte stream, same as its input. The same holds for any program. If you want to give it some other type then you need at least a casting mechanism. You probably also want a splitting mechanism, with a regular expression for the field separator. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282