Re: Why zsh?

["Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Aug 31,  1:43am, Arthur Alinovi wrote:
} 
} So far, I'm very impressed by what I see. However, a friend of mine
} (who is a bit of a unix wizard) uses tcsh and is curious as to what
} zsh can do that tcsh couldn't do if he wrote a 500 line .cshrc file

* Execute standard /bin/sh scripts.

* Handle ANY signal, not just INT and HUP.

* Redirect stderr without redirecting stdout as well.

* Parse real semantic control structures (loops, functions, etc.) rather
  than syntactic sugar that sort of looks like a control structure. [%]

And those are just the features common to any Bourne-like shell, such as
bash or ksh as well as zsh.  How about:

* Do real multi-line editing of arbitrary text (not just command lines).

* Do floating point arithmetic.  (Ok, so you need zsh 4.x for that one.)

* Save that 500 line startup file in byte-compiled form so it doesn't
  need to be parsed again the next time.  (Yeah, that's 4.x as well.)

I could go on, but there's no way to explain things like multios and
process substitutions in two lines of text, and you should have the idea
by now.

> "zsh is better that tcsh, because..."

... no one has yet had any reason to write a document entitled "Zsh
Programming Considered Harmful."

	http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

----------
[%] I quote from <http://www.tcsh.org/tcsh.html/Control_flow.html>:

    "If the shell's input is not seekable, the shell buffers up input
     whenever a loop is being read and performs seeks in this internal
     buffer to accomplish the rereading implied by the loop."

-- 
Bart Schaefer                                 Brass Lantern Enterprises
http://www.well.com/user/barts              http://www.brasslantern.com

Zsh: http://www.zsh.org | PHPerl Project: http://phperl.sourceforge.net