From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 20348 invoked from network); 10 Jul 2001 11:40:42 -0000 Received: from sunsite.dk (130.225.51.30) by ns1.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 10 Jul 2001 11:40:42 -0000 Received: (qmail 10814 invoked by alias); 10 Jul 2001 11:40:36 -0000 Mailing-List: contact zsh-workers-help@sunsite.dk; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk X-No-Archive: yes X-Seq: 15361 Received: (qmail 10803 invoked from network); 10 Jul 2001 11:40:35 -0000 X-VirusChecked: Checked Sender: kiddleo@cav.logica.co.uk Message-ID: <3B4AE994.14216030@u.genie.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 12:40:04 +0100 From: Oliver Kiddle X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Korn CC: Zsh hackers list Subject: Re: Proposal to standardize the shell References: <20010709223550.73E8514283@pwstephenson.fsnet.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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. > > If the zsh workers are also interested in this effort let me know. The effort does sound interesting to me. Your suggested starting points seem sensible and I'd be keen for there to be input from us so that current zsh features and incompatibilities can be accounted for in the process. > Also, if you know who else should be included, please let me know. Maybe the pdksh developers but I'm not sure how alive that project is. Peter Stephenson wrote: > 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. Certainly, there may be problems with some of the more advanced features but I think there is a fair amount of scope for extensions to POSIX which wouldn't cause many problems. If I'm not mistaken, there were quite a few extensions to POSIX that were in ksh88 and these are fairly well followed by bash and zsh. I think there are also a number of newer features where we don't have incompatibilities. Process substitution would be one example. Can anyone please point me in the direction of the canonical web location for the POSIX shell definition because my search wasn't very successful? > 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 I didn't mention ksh93 key binding in my recent post but it is very different. In short, there is a KEYBD trap which you override to change keypresses. I expect the zsh/bash bindkey builtin was inspired by tcsh. There might be other areas of interactive features which can be standardised on though. Parts of the history mechanism, fc options maybe. Oliver _____________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by the MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service. For further information visit http://www.messagelabs.com/stats.asp