On Wed, 10 May 2006, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
Funny this should come up. We've just had several submissions to work on a functional shell for the google summer of code.
Here's a bit of a summary of what's been done in Haskell I prepared a while back.
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pls/thesis-topics/functionalshell.html
My background is more shells than FP, so I'm not sure what to make of this - if we're talking about doing things for educational purposes, or serious attempts to make a viable alternative to ... something. At any rate, for anyone thinking about writing a UNIX shell, here are two items that might be worth reading: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/ A rant about the failings of csh. Particularly note the first topic about file descriptors - if you think the UNIX file descriptor system (the numbers, dup2(), etc.) is quaint but not worth taking very seriously, then you have a lot in common with other people interested in higher level languages (Bill Joy wrote csh) but probably should not be writing a UNIX shell. Tom C. has been doing this rant longer than he has been doing Perl. http://cm.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/rc.pdf The Plan 9 shell. Plan 9 comes from the inventors of UNIX, and its shell is one of the few really good ones. There's a UNIX implementation, whose author also collaborated on "es", which another pretty interesting shell, I see it's mentioned on the UNSW web page. Plus a bonus one for the functional connection - I can't find any detailed information about it, but several years ago the next generation Amiga was going to have an FP shell. Here's an article, not in English, sorry, but isn't Italian a beautiful language! http://www.quantum-leap.it/default_frame.asp?id=30 Donn Cave, donn@drizzle.com