yIn article <4cas8j$kd@jive.cs.utexas.edu>
wilson@cs.utexas.edu "Paul Wilson" writes:
> Has anybody looked at the problem of providing a nice cross-platform
> shell/scripting language, particularly one that would work on Windows95
> and NT?
I'd welcome that!
> 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.
I'm not sure if you can fork using Win32, but I'm not that familiar
with the Win32 API, as all of my code has to also work with Win16,
which means I can't use the multitasking features yet.
> 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.
I'm also interested in cross-platform development. I don't know how Win32
handles slashes, but DOS can cope with both slashes and backslashes, even
if most people don't know it. The problem is that the DOS command shell
only understands backslashes. I only recently discovered this!
> Anybody have experience with shells or scripting languages running
> on multiple platforms, for serious development work?
Ask me later this year, and I may be able to offer some experience. ;-)
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