Re: Scripting vs. Programming language vs. 4GL?

On Tue, 31 Aug 1993 00:42:35 GMT, Jim McDonald (mcdonald@kestrel.edu) wrote:


    In fact, lisp is a wonderful shell/scripting language. [ ... ] People
    who have been spoiled by lisp environments find the restrictions of
    unix shells maddening [ ... ]


I thoroughly agree with this. Actually *any* nice language can be used as
a shell language; it is not difficult for example to extend Icon, or Perl to
be a shell (or any other language which sports an interpreter).


Actually some people at Yale about ten years ago did a Unix/PDP-11 lisp shell;
wonderful stuff; one could write something like "(sort (ls))", or perhaps
"(mapcar (function cc) (ls "*.c"))" and so on. Down with pipes, that
are a silly and restrive idea! (The original Multics shell was supposed to
have a lisp like, functional, syntax).
[The Lisp shell was written up in two papers in SIGPLAN, one by John Ellis,
one by me. We didn't think it was a big deal but Ellis has told me that he's
gotten more comments on that than on any of his more substantive later work.
-John]
--

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