Understanding the Bourne Shell (was Re: Finding the last arg)

[Ronald S H Khoo]

allbery at ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:

> There is one other problem.  I daresay it would be possible to make Bourne
> shell syntax a bit more "regular" by using a yacc grammar.  THIS WON'T WORK!
> At least, not without making the shell much less useful

Well, the some of the chaps at research seem to be quite happy with "rc"
and that's got a yacc grammar...  Apparently it was too painful to
port /bin/sh to Plan 9 so Duff wrote "rc".  (He presented a paper on it
to the UKUUG Summer Conference last year)

rc has exactly what you describe -- a regularised /bin/sh syntax.

And of course, since they use Gnots running Pike's windowing stuff, no
command line history/editing or anything like that in rc, it's just a shell,
and looks quite nice too.  Pity it's not available.
-- 
ronald at robobar.co.uk +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)