Re: [Haskell-cafe] [OT?] Haskell-inspired functions for BASH

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 11:17 AM, Stephen Tetley wrote:

On 6 April 2010 15:09, Mario Blažević wrote:

...

       A question of my own: is there any written design (an academic paper would be perfect) of a functional shell language?

Olin Shivers has written a detailed paper on Scsh.

ftp://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh-paper.ps

The link might be down permanently (it is for me at the moment), maybe the paper is on Citeseer or similar. There is also the Scsh manual.

Best wishes

Stephen

The Scsh manual is worth reading just for the introductory material. Part of the problem is that both Clean and Scheme have relatively easy and powerful 'eval' ability. (Esther exploits the interesting feature of Clean that lets you serialize functions to disk.) Haskell doesn't, so much. The GHC API isn't too great to work with here; it's hard enough to evaluate straight Haskell fragments, and to serve as a shell, you really need new syntax; for example, you want literals for program names. (Who would use a shell which forces you to write 'run "ghci" ["foo.lhs"]', instead of 'ghci foo.lhs'?) But many filenames break in Haskell; 'ssh-agent', 'g++-4.4', 'bf_tar', etc. -- gwern