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

[David Elliott]

In article <2323 at munnari.oz> kre at munnari.oz (Robert Elz) writes:
>In article <2402 at rtech.rtech.com>, daveb at llama.rtech.UUCP (Dave Brower) writes:
>> [Quotes:] >% mkdir {man,cat}{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}
>> This is the single, lonesome, only thing that I like about csh that
>> isn't done adequately or better in ksh or the BRL sh.
>
>It is an important one, but !$ is just as important.  I have never used
>a BRL sh, but ksh's $_ (while useful itself sometimes), just doesn't come
>close.
...
>neither of which will do anything like what you want if you replace
>csh with ksh and !$ with $_

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.

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).

Then again, there's always those great folks at BRL who will do it
for you.  Maybe *they* should be the ones doing Unix (half :-).