From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from proxy4.ba.best.com ([206.184.139.15]) by hawkwind.utcs.utoronto.ca with SMTP id <25026>; Wed, 15 Dec 1999 03:22:26 -0500 Received: from peanut.rakitzis.com (dynamic49.pm01.san-mateo.best.com [205.149.174.49]) by proxy4.ba.best.com (8.9.3/8.9.2/best.out) with ESMTP id BAA01104; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 01:45:59 -0800 (PST) Received: (from byron@localhost) by peanut.rakitzis.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) id BAA04801; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 01:44:19 -0800 Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 04:44:19 -0500 From: Byron Rakitzis Message-Id: <199912140944.BAA04801@peanut.rakitzis.com> To: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu, tjg@star.le.ac.uk Subject: Re: rc futures A couple of comments, not exhaustive: > 12. Extra parentheses around `~' and `!' are syntax errors (you'll > have to get rc-1.6b2 to see what this is about). I suspect that these > "surprising" special cases can be fixed with minor tweaks to the > grammar. (Suggestion due to Bengt Kleberg.) They are not syntax errors -- ; while ((~ 1 1) && (~ 2 2)) {} ~ not found Parentheses introduce a word list -- a command list is introduced with {}. Thus: ; while ({! 1 1} && {! 2 2}) {} 1 not found 2 not found 1 not found 2 not found 1 not found 2 not found Maybe I don't understand the nature of the complaint. > 16. Make `*' match files beginning with `.' (except `.' and `..', of > course). This is something of a religious question, but my feeling is > that special treatment of "dot files" is a mistake. (Suggestion ditto.) I'm really unsure about the justification for this. This breaks compatability with so many versions of Unix that it really makes me wonder what the point is. Just because plan 9 doesn't have dotfiles doesn't necessarily mean we want to foist this on Unix users of rc. > 23. Dynamically load readline only when rc is about to read from a > terminal device. This would mean that a single rc binary would be > lean and fast for scripts, but still do readline for interactive use. > However, I suspect that the effort involved in making this happen > portably would be considerable. I don't even know what to say about this. The mind boggles. The idea that the readline library is so cumbersome that it needs to be dynamically loaded really weirds me out. Is it that huge now? Processors have improved by a couple orders of magnitude since I wrote rc! What if a talented programmer spent a month doing a readline replacement? Could he make it weigh in at 10% of the size of GNU readline? 5%? 1%? Sorry, it's late here and I'm babbling. Byron.