In article <4cgsk4$167@info.epfl.ch>,
Stefan Monnier <stefan.monnier@lia.di.epfl.ch> wrote:
>In article <y5ag2dwxkmk.fsf@graphics.cs.nyu.edu>,
>David Fox <fox@graphics.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>] Could you elaborate? What is it about what you look for and
>] expect from an interactive shell that requires a different syntax?
>] The examples you give show that the languages you use now happen
>] to have different syntaxes, but don't explain why they must be
>] different.
>
>I don't know for his personal reasons, but in my case there are a few:
>
>- every keystroke counts in interactive use
Yes. This is why I'm proposing that function calls require no parentheses
at all, and that unbound functions default to running another program,
with no extra syntax required.
I didn't make it clear in my earlier post, but I assume that a call to
an unbound function implicitly backquotes its arguments (as the run
command in scsh does), before spawning a process to run an external program.
I also assumed that these backquoted arguments would be coerced to strings
in the obvious way to be passed as command-line arguments to programs in
the usual way.
>- I don't really care if my script is 20 or 50 lines long, as long as it was
> easy to write and is easy to read.
I think length matters (despite popular protestations to the contrary :-),
but that there's a 90/10 rule. Most simple scripts do simple things, so
simple things should be terse. More complicated things (like defining
your own fancy data types and control constructs within a script) should
be less terse and clearer, so that the fancy tricks are more obvious.
>- I never use complex control structures in interactive use. Or when I use
>them,
> I don't care as much whether it takes me 2 or 5 lines. I'd rather have a nice
> than a terse syntax in this case.
Yes. I think we're in agreement on this. Simple things should be terse and
obvious, and complicated things should be possible and clear.
>
> Stefan
--
| 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/)
|