POSIX bashing

[Root Boy Jim]

In article <72242 at brunix.UUCP> cgy at cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
?In article <129131 at uunet.UU.NET> rbj at uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
?>
?>I think the real challenge is to put readline and termcap into the kernel.
?
?Kernel?  You mean the "watermelon," right?

I like that. Actually, I mean a subset of the two.  Note that one
doesn't have to be ruthless about optimizing each micro termcap motion;
that is clearly wasted effort.

?As someone has already pointed out, the cost of context switching to handle
?character I/O is negligible on most new systems.  Why bloat the kernel any
?more?  Why not put it in a shlib and let the apps use it?

I recall much talk about adding an extra layer.

?>If the kernel did enuf editing, the shell could run in cooked mode and still
?>be usable.
?
?This is a wild goose chase, in my opinion.  Applications will continually
?want more kernel editing, and cooked mode will become less and less of a
?useful feature and more and more of an ugly backward-compatibility hack.
?Eventually, you're right back where you started, with everyone using
?raw/cbreak mode; except that the kernel is now twice as big.  This is how
?Unix got the way it is.

I don't think so. Both tcsh and ksh use more or less the same commands,
the same as the one-stroke emacs commands (vi mode users, take off, eh?
Maybe you'll learn emacs if we spoon feed it to you in the terminal driver).
There are only so many ways to do things. The path is clear.

Besides, I don't see that a clean, efficient, reasonably complete
implementation couldn't be written in less space than the current
terminal driver.
-- 
		[rbj at uunet 1] stty sane
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