From: wilson@cs.utexas.edu (Paul Wilson)
Newsgroups: alt.lang.scheme.scsh
Date: 2 Jan 1996 03:01:07 -0600
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.
Better than hacking up Unix->Win filename conversions, have an
OS-independent data structure for defining filenames -- like
Common Lisp or MIT Scheme. Programs can operate on these parsed
structures. Then convert the structure to a filename using the
appropriate rules for the given OS -- slashes in Unix, backslashes
for Win32, and so forth.
I never did this for scsh because scsh is hard-core committed to Unix,
but it's the right way to live.
-Olin
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