Enhanced shell standard. summary

[Peter Stephenson <pws@pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk>]

Before I make a firm suggestion about what we want from zsh in an
enhanced shell, here's a summary of proposals made by me, Oliver, Bart
and Zefram, with a little editorial pruning --- I didn't want to go over
the top, but have included a few things mentioned by other people that
they seemed to be particularly keen on, even if I have doubts they're
suitable for standardisation.

The first section means I haven't yet done my homework about what's
already in Posix or single UNIX, but will do when this finally settles
down.

Reasonably rapid responses --- must-have additions, must-not-have
subtractions --- would be appreciated, I don't want this preliminary
round to drag on much longer since until the people from the other shell
have commented it's a bit of a moot discussion.

check posix
-----------
disown, builtin, suspend
pushd
typeset, declare
[[ ... ]]
parameters LOGNAME or USER or USERNAME
  LINENO
  COLUMNS/LINES
process substitution, at least <<(...)

basic, already present in more than 1
--------------------------------------
whence
${name/pattern/repl}
{a,b}
** math power operator
parameters:
  ERRNO
  HOST or HOSTNAME
  SHLVL, RANDOM, SECONDS
  HOSTTYPE, OSTYPE, MACHTYPE
cd takes care of symlinks, optionally resolves linkso
-l option to shell for login
some form of enhanced pattern matching, e.g. like ksh88.
$-expanion in prompts to be standard

additions
---------
emulate
autoload -U, NO_ALIASES
<<<'word'
functionality of precmd, chpwd, periodic
${+foo} to check whether set
coproc
{0..10}
glob qualifiers, also history-like modifiers on glob patterns.
** recursive search
parameters: CPUTYPE, VENDOR, ERRNO
version of enhanced shell spec, maybe via namespace
functionality associated with disable/enable for builtin --- but name clash
repeat loop (repeat 10; do print hello; done)
standardisation of basic key bindings [need list]
-L options to may builtins to list in form for input to shell
  [or make this defined behaviour --- will need option in zsh for
  compatibility]
if namespaces, possible magic settable variables, corresponding
  to zsh's EGID/GID, EUID/UID (note suitable for standardising as they
  are, because the magic behaviour would clash with Posix).

maybe optional
--------------
=cmdname

Hmmm [meaning I don't now much we can really do here...]
----
history commands and parameters

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk>
Work: pws@csr.com
Web: http://www.pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk