From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from apollo.le.ac.uk ([143.210.16.125]) by hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu with SMTP id <25676>; Mon, 8 May 2000 05:03:19 -0400 Received: from happy.star.le.ac.uk ([143.210.36.58]) by apollo.le.ac.uk with smtp (Exim 3.13 #2) id 12oivL-0003lp-00 for rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu; Mon, 08 May 2000 09:29:55 +0100 Received: (qmail 10156 invoked from network); 8 May 2000 08:30:17 -0000 Received: from ltpcg.star.le.ac.uk (tjg@143.210.36.203) by happy.star.le.ac.uk with SMTP; 8 May 2000 08:30:17 -0000 To: rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu Subject: Re: building rc on QNX4 In-Reply-To: <20000504171816.B12075@polka.mi.linux.it> Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 04:29:54 -0400 From: Tim Goodwin Message-ID: > A more important issue IMHO is whether Rc should provide a built-in > read function, similar to the one offered by most Bourne shells; There is no *need* to make `read' a builtin: see the EXAMPLES file in the distribution for an alternative. One of rc's design goals is to avoid unnecessary builtins. So, no, I don't think this is likely to happen. (I accept that there is some work to be done, first in terms of documentation: the EXAMPLES file is not as visible as it should be. Also, I have some vague ideas for the future about a package of small utilities to work with rc (and other shells); one of these would be something like `line'---unfortunately not available everywhere---and make a building block for an efficient `read' function.) > another > one is whether it will ever make it possible not to export everything to > the environment by default. I brought this up a few months ago, and the consensus seemed to be that the current scheme works well enough in practice. Have you encountered a problem? Tim.