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Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1992 05:56:12 -0600
From: malte@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Message-Id: <9203121156.AA12326@dahlie.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
To: rc@archone.tamu.edu
Subject: talking about syntax

I'd like to suggest an improvement to rc's manual page.

	1) commands may be preceeded by local variable definitions
	2) simple commands can be grouped by '{' and '}'
	3) backquote substitution looks like `{ complex_command }
	   or `simple_command

The manpages also says that amongst others '`' and '{' are special characters
to rc. Simple minds may come to the conclusion that

	echo ` x=list { echo $x }

is valid rc syntax.
My suggestion is not to enumerate special charaters but special tokens, one
of them being '`{'.

Another suggestion is to change the parser in a way that '~' is only
special if it is a command, just like '\' is only special if being followed
by a newline charater. This would make it possible to specify negated character
classes in pattern matching in the same way as other shells do, thus making
transition from [c]sh to rc a little easier. It will also allow a simple
hack to use ~ as a substitute for $HOME.

Malte.