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
Looking at the brief description of the Esther shell, I was struck by the question - why not just use Haskell directly ie by extending something like GHCi to allow interactive definition of functions/values and an operator to map filenames to functions. I was reminded of http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_... and in particular the following principle: Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one. Regards, Brian.