🚀 go-pugleaf

jpenne@ee.ualberta.ca (Jerry Penner) writes:

>Just a question (as the subject line says), why did you go with 'csh'
>compatibility in the first place?  Unix csh is broken (as far as
>programming the thing goes.  Its command line interface works fine,
>except that it lacks command line editing and most versions I've
>played with don't have filename completion working).  The other
>shells like ksh, bash, etc are better...  Of course, this is just an
>interest-based question since you're obviously not going to change it
>now.

  gsh takes a lot of inspiration from tcsh, the modern derivative of
csh, which provides command-line editing, smarter path handling,
and filename and command completion.
  We never studied a whole lot on any aspect of why csh's script
language might be considered 'broken'.  Can you provide some examples?

>I don't own GNO so I'm also wondering how tightly coupled is the GNO
>kernel to the 'gsh' shell?  Can it be replaced with something else or
>would you have to start up another shell from inside it.  It would be
>cool to have 'chsh /bin/ksh' work in GNO.

  gsh is completely (100%) decoupled from the kernel.  We did it just
like Unix because, well, Unix did it right :)  chsh .. is trivial,
but right now gsh is the only shell we've got.  I expect this to
change in the future.  gsh also provides some IIgs-specific
support that the Unix based shells cannot (like AppleWorks _and_ emacs
style command line editing).

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