Re: Shell Central

[jbrock@panix.com (John Brock)]

In article <aknsli$1kb8df$1@ID-125932.news.dfncis.de>,
Christopher Browne  <cbbrowne@acm.org> wrote:
>In the last exciting episode, peter@abbnm.com (Peter da Silva) wrote::
>> In article <42f85d82.0208290655.549f1e67@posting.google.com>,
>> Ed Davis <ed_davis2@yahoo.com> wrote:

>>> How about BUSH!
>>> 
>>> http://www.vaxxine.com/pegasoft/bush.html
>>> 
>>> It is sort of like BASH, but uses a subset of Ada as the
>>> scripting language.

>> Doesn't seem terribly well adapted to the UNIX paradigm of pipes and
>> filters. It's more like a scripting language that defaults to "exec"
>> for unknown commands. Useful, but not really a shell.

>BUSH may be very simply characterized:
>
>  It's about writing "scripts" in Ada.
>
>Parallel it with REXX, which essentially provides a simplified version
>of PL/1.
>
>BUSH takes things a _bit_ further than REXX; it's apparently
>sufficiently similar to the Parent Language that it is expected to be
>relatively easy to modify scripts to make them compilable into plain
>Ada code.

BUSH looks far more elaborate than the sort of thing I was thinking
of, and I agree that it is not really a shell (nor is REXX for that
matter, although it would make a good shell for VM/CMS, if VM/CMS
had shells).  What about file expansion for example?  After browsing
the tutorial I didn't see how to do something like "ls *.txt".
The language I have in mind would *feel* like a shell, and share
a number of conventions with the bourne shell family, even though
some things would be quite different.

But BUSH does seem to be an example of something I have always
thought should be more common: a language intended from the beginning
to give user the option of either compiling or interpreting.  IBM
actually did have a REXX compiler on VM/CMS, which speeded up
execution by a factor of up to 10.  At the time I used it the
compiler didn't support the "interpret" instruction, but I believe
that was added later.  Anyway, this is such a useful feature that
I wonder why it isn't more common?
-- 
John Brock
jbrock@panix.com