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Date:      Tue, 23 Jul 2002 13:45:41 -0400
From:      "Brian F. Feldman" <green@freebsd.org>
To:        Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk>
Cc:        naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber), freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Scripting languages (was: Re: Package system flaws?) 
Message-ID:  <200207231745.g6NHjfZ47049@green.bikeshed.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 23 Jul 2002 18:06:33 BST." <200207231706.g6NH6XOV076926@dotar.thuvia.org> 

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Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> I'll return to my "polish /bin/sh up a bit with a list type and
> implement dynamically loadable builtins" view of the world, until
> such time as an obvious replacement shell comes along.
> 
> I think many of the issues regarding maintaining an arbitrary third party
> scripting environment in the base system would be mitigated by fairly minor
> enhancements to existing facilities.

No.  No, they wouldn't.  I advise VERY strongly against trying to do things 
with sh which it is bad at.  Korn gets that very wrong and makes ksh do a 
lot of nice things but couples with a syntax which is _BAD_ for a 
general-purpose language.  There are _so_ many small, perfectly good 
scripting languages that could be used instead, and are tremendously easier 
to learn (much easier than learning how to do weird magic in sh).

The solution probably isn't to maintain yet another scripting language in 
the tree.  It's also not to use a Bourne shell.  Maybe it is acceptable to 
write something totally new, I don't know.  It shouldn't look anything like 
sh, though.

(Sorry, Warner. :)

-- 
Brian Fundakowski Feldman                           \'[ FreeBSD ]''''''''''\
  <> green@FreeBSD.org  <> bfeldman@tislabs.com      \  The Power to Serve! \
 Opinions expressed are my own.                       \,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\



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