Proposal to standardize the shell

[David Korn <dgk@research.att.com>]

Hi, I am the author of ksh.  One of my primary goals in writing ksh was
to provide a portable and universal scripting language for UNIX.

I worked with the POSIX group in the development of a shell standard
over ten years ago.  Since then there have been numerous developments
and various shells have emerged with many new and useful features.

I would like to see if it is possible to come up with an enhanced
shell standard that could be met by at least ksh, bash, and zsh.
I have already contacted the bash author Chet Ramey, and he is
interested.  I am especially concerned with programming issues,
but there might be some interactive features that could also
be standardized.

If the zsh workers are also interested in this effort let me know.
Also, if you know who else should be included, please let me know.
As a starting point we should develop the following lists:

1.	Extensions to POSIX that are in all three shells.
2.	Incompatibilities between shells.
3.	Extensions or features in each shell that should be in
	the standard.
4.	Things that should be obsoleted.
5.	How do handle compatibilty issues between shells and POSIX.

Once we have achieved some type of consensus, we should see if
we can get some standards organization, such as POSIX or X/Open
to work on standardization.

David Korn
research!dgk
dgk@research.att.com