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From:	culliton@srg.af.mil (Tom Culliton x2278)
X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2)
To:	rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu
Subject: Re: wishlist
Date:	Tue, 25 May 1993 19:58:52 -0400
Message-Id: <9305251958.aa28217@ceres.srg.af.mil>

(Damn!  How do I manage to get such vigorous "discussions" going?)

Re: what to take out (Alan Watson)

This was not my intent but I do have a favorite candidate, which never
made sense to me: `` which is just syntactic sugar for ifs=(...) {...}
Everything else seems like it really belongs.

Re: empowering features/simplifications (Erik Quanstrom)

I think rc has already done pretty well here, and can't think of any
proposed addition that really seems like a big win to me.  Possibly read
so you can chew up text files (awk is probably a better choice), or flag
so you can manipulate the behaviour.  Nothing else seems like it gives
you the kind of big win that lack of rescanning, variables as lists,
clean quoting, or even builtin ~ does.

Re: Conformance with Plan 9 rc (John Mackin)

John correctly points out that you'll probably never be able to port a
Unix rc script to Plan 9 or vice-versa just because the environments are
so different, and that Byron has made some major improvements and fixed
a number of the bugs listed in the Plan 9 man page.  I still think it
would be nice to keep the two as close as possible, especially for
arbitrary differences like $" vs. $^.  This makes the various Plan 9
docs and papers more useful and otherwise broadens our experience base.

Tom