Olin Shivers <shivers@lambda.ai.mit.edu> writes:
| I would further suggest that you'd be even better off punting this whole
| idea of the command-line/transcript model of shell interaction. You could
| instead use the emacs editor Edwin (written in Scheme) together with the
| Unix API provided by scsh to do a screen-oriented shell, where common
| commands would be bound to control keys, less common commands invoked from
| meta-x, and complex operations performed by entering fragments of Scheme
| and scsh process notation. Best of both worlds -- interactivity and
| programmability.
IMHO, simulating a lisp machine on top of unix is a sterile and
unsatisfying approach. In particular, it just doesn't make sense to
expend dozens of megabytes of ram using edwin and scsh for what should
be a small, efficient tool.
Much better results come from mechanisms in the style of Oberon, such
as Wily, where inexpensive mechanisms are used to integrate the user
interface with the beauty of the underlying system. (As usual, perl,
tcl, and python are popular languages among wily users.)
<URL: ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/gary/wily/ >
If you want a command interpreter with lisp-like properties, there are
shells, such as es, which do the job, and are orders of magnitude
smaller than scsh. <URL: ftp://ftp.white.toronto.edu/pub/es/ >
|