On 18 Apr 1997 20:38:04 -0400, Olin Shivers
<shivers@lambda.ai.mit.edu> wrote:
> From: alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk (Alaric B. Williams)
>
> But how about (glob <filespec>), which returns a list of string
> filenames...
> Saves all that messiness of escape codes and so on!
> Which would you rather write:
>
> (run (mv ,@(glob "*.txt") /tmp))
>or
> mv *.txt /tmp
Exactly. A nicer solution for an interactive syntax would be to have,
perhaps, "globbing brackets":
mv {*.txt} /tmp
IE, we escape /into/ the special behaviour, rather than /out/ of it.
The interactive parser should easily be able to expand that to:
(run (mv ,@(glob "*.txt") /tmp))
with simple rules and nice things like that.
>If you are interested in these sorts of issues, you might enjoy reading
>one or two documents I wrote about this kind of thing:
>
> ftp://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh-paper.ps
> ftp://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh-manual.ps
> http://www.ai.mit.edu/~shivers/ll.ps
I just did, actually!
>As you have noticed, it is certainly a fun design problem to think about.
> -Olin
Yeah :-)
ABW
--
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Alaric B. Williams Internet : alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk
<A HREF="http://www.abwillms.demon.co.uk/">Hello :-)</A>
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