A general desire for rc 1.5/1.6

A general desire for rc 1.5/1.6

[Chris Siebenmann]

 It would be nice if all the scattered prototypes for various system
functions could be centralized in one header file; it seems that lots
of systems have conflicting definitions for some or all of them, and
it's annoying to have to touch four or five rc source files to get rc
to compile.

	- cks
[The latest one is the Cray EL92 under Unicos, which complains about
 opendir() in glob.c and stat() in which.c.]

Re: A general desire for rc 1.5/1.6

[Scott Schwartz]

|  It would be nice if all the scattered prototypes for various system
| functions could be centralized in one header file; it seems that lots
| of systems have conflicting definitions for some or all of them, and
| it's annoying to have to touch four or five rc source files to get rc
| to compile.

One thing I'd like to see for 1.6 is some utility routines abstracted 
out into libraries.  I've already taken Paul's print routines and 
rewhacked them into libprint.a, fixing a number of bugs in the process
(which were benign since rc didn't exercise them.)  It's a little
bigger (5K vs 2K) but it does lots more (famous last words, I know).

If anyone wants to check it out, you can ftp it from
	ftp://groucho.cse.psu.edu/pub/scott/print.shar

If similar things were done to the globber and glomer you could get
shell globbing in other programs (in opposition to the unix tradition
of not reusing code.)

Re: A general desire for rc 1.5/1.6

[Scott Schwartz]

I wrote:
> ftp://groucho.cse.psu.edu/pub/scott/print.shar

If anyone does check this out, please send me whatever feedback
you have.

Re: A general desire for rc 1.5/1.6

[Steve_Kilbane]

> From: Scott Schwartz <schwartz%groucho.cse.psu.edu@cegelecproj.co.uk>

> One thing I'd like to see for 1.6 is some utility routines abstracted 
> out into libraries. [...]
> If similar things were done to the globber and glomer you could get
> shell globbing in other programs (in opposition to the unix tradition
> of not reusing code.)

Hmm. sounds a bit like tcl to me. Still, I had considered a while back that
it would be useful to write a shell (Bourne, I was thinking, specifically),
library by library for this very reason. Variable expansion was going to be
the first thing to do, since that's more generally useful than wildcard
expansion ("Why *can't* I enter $HOME/my_file in this text field?").

But of course, real work intruded. Now I'll just use tcl. :-)

steve