This is the first public release of scsh, release 0.1.
Scsh is a Unix shell that is embedded within R4RS Scheme.
It provides high-level shell notation and full access to
the Unix system calls. The current implementation is built
on top of Scheme 48, version 0.36.
We currently have scsh running on
Sparcstations,
NetBSD,
Linux,
HP-UX
NeXTSTEP Intel systems
It's not hard to port scsh to new systems.
You can get a copy of scsh via anonymous ftp, from the following:
ftp://clark.lcs.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh.tar.z
ftp://swiss-ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh.tar.z
These tar files include a detailed manual and a paper describing
the design of the system.
The current release is primarily useful for writing shell scripts
and doing general systems programming.
Real interactive use needs a parser for an sh-like syntax, job control,
and the gnu readline library. If you're interested in hacking
on these things, drop us a line at scheme-underground@ai.mit.edu.
We've got designs for most of this stuff; we're just short on time
and bodies.
For the next minor release, we're mostly going to focus on merging in our
network code (so people can run our ftp, http, smtp, and telnet Scheme code
along with our Web server toolkit), our awk replacement, and bugfixes we get
for the first release. We will also merge in support for new platforms
if people send in the code.
For the release after that, we'll try and get current with S48 releases, which
will get us thread capability. So we're pretty busy even w/o the interactive
features.
We were sure this summer we'd have this thing out by August.
Thanks for being so patient.
-Olin Shivers, Brian Carlstrom & David Albertz
Cambridge
October 31, 1994
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