🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Nov18.090654.24747@agate.berkeley.edu> pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve) writes:
> We don't have to give up on un-named pipes, though -- just pull our
> thinking out of the unix rut.  The pipe/filter concept was a magnificent
> stroke of genius when it was thought up, but that was 20 years ago now.
> Let's see if we can do better.

About 6 years ago I got a bug up my ass about pipes being strictly linear.
I played with various "better" shells, and implemented a couple of syntaxes.
Working with a *text* interface I could never get anything better, though I
must admit ksh has made a bit of a breakthrough on the output side...

But...

The Mac had just come out and I was thinking about visual shells. What I
came up with was something like this:

Each program has an icon with a set of input and output ports:

	+--------+		+---------+
	|        |	        |         + O
      I +  grep  + O          I |   tee   |
	|        |		|         + O
	+--------+              +---------+


To build a program, you move the icons into place and connect them up with
lines. Files are represented by tanks:

	     +--------+	  +---------+
	     |        |   |         +---(workfile)
( ifile ) ---+  grep  +---+   tee   |
	     |        |	  |         +---...
	     +--------+   +---------+
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
<peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.