Second, the path searching forms of exec use the Bourne shell convention
that any slash in the path suppresses path searching. Some other
shells, notably rc, suppress the search iff the first character of
the path is slash or dot. That behavior is more useful because you
can use it to better distinguish commands or package them into
directories to be accessed by partially qualified name. For example,
mh/pick, X11/resize.
Yeah, you're right. But Posix's path-search exec commands use the semantics
scsh uses -- that's why we did it. Of course, that doesn't make it right...
Let me mull that over.
Third, the reader gets unhappy when fed UTF-8 encoded unicode. UTF is
very well behaved, so it would be nice if scheme-48 accepted it. (scm
does, by the way.) Using 9term, a plan9 style terminal emulator for
X11, you would type the letter lambda as <compose>*l. In other words,
troff-esque escape sequences give you greek letters and similar
glyphs.
Right. It's an ASCII reader, and strings are ASCII strings. I'd have to
and change the low-level string and character reps before I could change
the reader.
That is a very cute idea, though. C'mon. Volunteer and do the work for me...
It's a purely Scheme 48 thing; really has nothing to do with scsh. You would
have to get the PreScheme compiler off of swiss-ftp, change the VM, use
the PreScheme compiler to translate the VM to C, and there you are. Unicode
Scheme. My friends in Taiwan and Hong Kong would love it.
You realise that if you do this, I'll have to sit down and do some work on the
syscall interface -- right now byte i/o (read(2), write(2)) is done as char
i/o. If we switch to a non-byte char representation, I'll have to stop this
sleaze and clean up the I/O interface.
If you do it, I will fix up the syscall interface.
Finally, when you exit scsh, it says
Exit Scheme 48 (y/n)?
I'll only ask another 100 times.
It should probably call itself scsh, and only asking another 10 times
(or not at all) would be nicer.
A SWAT team of crack programmers have been assigned to handle this issue.
(Actually, Brian stuck it in last week.)
Thanks for the report.
-Olin
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