From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 19509 invoked from network); 9 Jul 2001 21:34:29 -0000 Received: from sunsite.dk (130.225.51.30) by ns1.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 9 Jul 2001 21:34:29 -0000 Received: (qmail 11759 invoked by alias); 9 Jul 2001 21:34:18 -0000 Mailing-List: contact zsh-workers-help@sunsite.dk; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk X-No-Archive: yes X-Seq: 15349 Received: (qmail 11727 invoked from network); 9 Jul 2001 21:34:18 -0000 To: David Korn , zsh-workers@sunsite.auc.dk (Zsh hackers list) Subject: Re: Proposal to standardize the shell In-reply-to: "David Korn"'s message of "Mon, 09 Jul 2001 15:42:22 EDT." <200107091942.PAA93250@raptor.research.att.com> Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2001 23:35:45 +0100 From: Peter Stephenson Message-Id: <20010709223550.73E8514283@pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk> David Korn wrote: > 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. We're definitely interested in tracking standards. A big question in our case is how to start up the shell in a way which enforces compliance; zsh has been a bit wayward right from the start and it's too late to change that now. So I'd be interested in some common command such as a version of our `emulate' command, e.g. with the argument `emulate posix' or `emulate enhanced' if we can come up with an enhanced version of it to ensure whatever shell you're in is likely to be as receptive as possible. No doubt this is less important for ksh and bash which have been designed from the ground up with this sort of thing in mind, but it would go a long way towards making scripts shareable in a simple way. Quite what degree of compatibility is possible between the more advanced features I really don't know, but it's worth thinking about. We've been treating ksh93 as a sort of de facto standard for some of the advanced features, though there's still quite a lot of that missing and (according to my reading of Oliver Kiddle's post to zsh-workers just now) some of it appears to be incompatible. In interactive features, there might be something we do with simple things like key binding syntax, for example. I doubt if it'll go much deeper than that; it depends too much on the implementation of the line editor, which I'm sure is very different in each case. So this could well be a big can of worms, but I'm sure there's plenty to talk about. -- Peter Stephenson Work: pws@csr.com Web: http://www.pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk