On Fri, 12 May 2006, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
... For simple commands and pipes, the bash syntax is perfect. For anything nontrivial, I use some other language anyway. I long ago wrote a Perl script to do a far more general form of the renaming example you gave above. As far as I know, the only reason people write nontrivial /bin/sh scripts is that it's the only scripting language that's universally available on Unix systems.
I have a blind spot here due to a visceral dislike of Perl, but I do think there's a slim chance that a really well designed language could be useful in that niche - roughly speaking, non-trivial shell scripts. You're right, I wouldn't be able to use it at work, just like "rc" or, for that matter, Haskell, but still I'd love to see it happen. I just think "really well designed" is a tall order, and the notion that you can get there by just dropping Haskell into this application domain is an absurdity on the order of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantasy of Tarzan appearing out of the jungle and being appointed chief of the Waziri. Donn Cave, donn@drizzle.com