Why csh still wins (was Re: Thank you, Bill Joy!)

[Michael Greim]

To join the recent discussion about
sh / csh / ksh / brl-sh (?) / tcsh ...

In <2910 at dunkshot.mips.COM> dce at dunkshot (David Elliott) writes:
>I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.  All the csh people
>are saying "we like some of the csh features", and the ksh people
>keep saying "you don't need them".  This kind of attitude is what is
>going to keep ksh from supplanting csh in the near future.

>
>Look, Dave Korn and anyone else that has the power to change ksh, add
>curly braces and csh-style history substitution to ksh -- and when I
>say add, make them optional so nobody is forced into anything -- and
>a lot of us will switch over.
Maybe, see below.

>
>Oh sure, there are still a crowd of csh programmers out there, but only
>about half of them do it because they only want to learn one shell language
>(the other half do it because they somehow got the idea that they can't
>run sh scripts from csh).  Make ksh a complete replacement for csh, and
>more people will buy it (make it part of the standard AT&T System V, or
>better yet public domain, and everyone will thank you).
Agreed.

We are running BSD4.3 on 2 VAX 11/780, SUN-OS 3.5 on some SUN 3/150,
ULTRIX (some-or-the-other) on a VAX 8600. On all these systems there
is csh. For interactive work most people prefer csh, simply because of
its history mechanism and job control features. For scripts we use
sh where speed counts. I would like to try out ksh, but we have been
told that it is not Public Domain but that it costs some (relativly small)
amount of dollars.
How should we convince the people at our University, who pay the bills,
that we need to buy another shell just for trying it out?
We had problems enough recently when we wanted to get FrameMaker (tm)
for our SUNs.
We have the diffs for tcsh and we have a source license for 4.3BSD, thus
including csh. So we could upgrade csh.
But:
- we cannot do this legally (yet) on our SUNs and under ULTRIX. 
- we have made a lot of changes to csh, especially a lot of test
	output and bugfixes (posted to the net some months ago), which will
	probably (!) cause patch to work wrong.
	I have simply been to lazy to try it.

ksh seems to be better than csh, but as long as we don't have it
(we are trying), we still use csh.

	-mg
-- 
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# include <disclaimers/std.h>