Has anybody looked at the problem of providing a nice cross-platform
shell/scripting language, particularly one that would work on Windows95
and NT?
Seems to me that most things most people do most of the time have clear
analogues on any modern, sane OS, and Win32 is getting closer to that
status. E.g., you should be able to write scripts that open sockets,
fork processes, etc.
Then again, I've never programmed Win32, so I don't really know.
Are there good cross-platform shells? Is it straightforward to define
a reasonable cross-platform subset plus some system-specific extensions?
I'm particularly interested in shells useful in the process of developing
software that works across platforms. If I set up my directories
essentially the same way under NT as under UNIX, and I write my programs
to take the same options, I should be able to exploit simple syntactic
fiddling to get things right on different platforms. For Win32, the
file paths could have their slashes converted to backslashes, and for
programs being glued together, the hyphens could be translated to
slashes. By following a few simple rules, I'd expect that most of
the really common tedious problems would go away.
Anybody have experience with shells or scripting languages running
on multiple platforms, for serious development work?
--
| Paul R. Wilson, Comp. Sci. Dept., U of Texas @ Austin (wilson@cs.utexas.edu)
| Papers on memory allocators, garbage collection, memory hierarchies,
| persistence and Scheme interpreters and compilers available via ftp from
| ftp.cs.utexas.edu, in pub/garbage (or http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wilson/)
|