Re: [9fans] Install from CD fails

[quanstro@quanstro.net]

yes.  there are a couple (okay, three) problems to address here.  byron and paul haahr
addressed some of the problems with a shell called "es" years ago, even though they
didn't have dynamic modules.

1.  what interface do external modules get to see?  perhaps masquerading as
a shell function would be good enough.

2. what hooks are provided by the shell.  the "es" shell provided a hook
for darn near every language construct there was.  for example, it was possible
to redefine globbing, piping, the if statement, etc.

i thought the result was effective, but somewhat like pounding a nail with
a jackhammer. (traditional shell syntax was first converted from
	a | b
to es's perferred syntax
	%pipe {a} 0 1 {b}
then bound as
	$&pipe {a} {b},
assuming one hadn't redefined %pipe.)

3. shell syntax vs. command syntax.  the shell's syntax often gets in the way
of command syntax.  mike hartel wrote up some stuff about this years ago.
basically, it's a pain that the shell and, say, grep, want to use the same characters.
i can't just type
	; grep ^fn *.[ch]
i must type
	; grep '^fn' *.[ch]
instead.  this would get very difficult if one added awk-like functions to the shell.
es did this: anything passed to a function inside curly braces was passed verbatim.
thus "if" in es looks like a normal es function call:
	; if {condition1} {body1} {condition2} {body2}
a trivial grep module could make
	; grep {^fn} *.[ch]
acceptable syntax.

- erik


On Wed Apr 19 14:35:12 CDT 2006, rvs@sun.com wrote:
>
>   Personally, my dream has always been to make all of the applications
>   which rely heavily on console input-output to be dynamically loaded
>   on top of each other, so that when I do something like:
>
>     $ bash
>     <long session with bash, with lots of useful stuff in history and such>
>     $ gdb
>
>   I don't leave shell (and lose all of the context) but I rather have
>   my shell augmented with gdb commands. Sort of like Tcl works with
>   external modules.
>
>   Have anybody thought about anything likes this ?
>
> Thanks,
> Roman.