From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pantransit.reptiles.org ([209.157.133.146]) by hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu with SMTP id <26168>; Sun, 14 May 2000 01:33:23 -0400 Received: (qmail 23615 invoked by uid 204); 12 May 2000 05:49:08 -0000 Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 01:49:08 -0400 Message-ID: <20000512054908.23614.qmail@pantransit.reptiles.org> From: "Smarasderagd" To: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu, schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: builtins Scott Schwartz writes: >My $0.02: if you have echo as a builtin, read deserves the same. Should it honour escaped newlines the way Bourne shell read does? Wouldn't it be nice if you could read arrays? But what we really want is to generalize all of the hidden goo that reads input until we can reimplement the main loop as "while () {read a; eval $a}", and optionally also "echo $a >> $history", and a replacement for - and -- that lets you do structural editing... >My other $0.02: echo needs a sibling builtin, quote, to enquote it's >arguments so that they can be read by the shell. Lisp got that right ages >ago. Inferno got it right more recently. Oh, I guess that IS where you want to go. :) Seriously, I don't see any real reason why a quoting function doesn't make sense, since whatis already does this...