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Perl, English, syntax for Scheme and shells (was Re: scsh in scm ...)

To: scsh@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Perl, English, syntax for Scheme and shells (was Re: scsh in scm ...)
From: Shriram Krishnamurthi <shriram@cs.rice.edu>
Date: Fri, 5 Jan 1996 14:19:16 -0600 (CST)
Reply-to: shriram@cs.rice.edu
Paul Wilson wrote:

>       (John Ellis?) did a Lisp shell several years ago, where any
>       unbound function name was assumed to be an indication that
>       the programmer meant to call a UNIX program. [...]

I thought (I'm about 800 miles from my Scsh docs ...) Olin explicitly
wrote about this in his document (in the Tao section?).  I agree with
Olin on this front.  One of the reasons I would even be interested in
this command system is to integrate the two environments cleanly.  To
then make commands dependent on the environment strikes me as a stride
in the wrong direction.

To resolve the situation, I could live with the language _defaulting_
in the other direction (ie, unless stated otherwise, the Unix
namespace is used), but even this strikes me as undesirable.
Personally, I know that if I could combine the two environments, most
of what I run would, in fact, be from the Scheme environment (much of
it, undoubtedly, chaining off eventually to something from Unix), and
the number of actual raw Unix commands I would use would be few.
Kolmogorov strikes.

'shriram

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