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From: avg@hq.demos.su (Vadim Antonov)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: UNIX mind-set -> OK, OK!
Message-ID: <1991Jan18.200441.28947@hq.demos.su>
Date: 18 Jan 91 20:04:41 GMT
References: <1991Jan14.013815.11419@ims.alaska.edu> <11314@lanl.gov> <5340@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <1991Jan14.170115.17178@Think.COM> <360@bria> <1991Jan17.185527.9824@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: DEMOS, Moscow, USSR
Lines: 19

Just for your information: the older shells (like vanilla V6 shell)
did not include globbing! The actual globbing was performed with the
separate command "glob" - so one could replace this command and get
a new globbing (you can find a rudimentary "glob" in your csh :-).
Interesting enough that actual if-s and goto-s were also implamented as
separate commands. They simply inherit an open command file descriptor
and move it into required location. The V6 shell itself was a rather
trivial program - about 1K lines. Later the commands goto, if, loops and
(even later :-) test + echo were moved inside shell for efficiency reasons.
chdir never was a separate program :-).

V6 was the true Unix, sigh. My V6-based system (V7-compatible exept for
file system and some ioctls) was able to run up to dozen of editor-compiler
users simultaneously on PDP-11/34 with 248K *core* RAM. The kernel
was about 64K (to compare with 1068K of XENIX kernel in my 386 box).
After all I cannot say it's much more functional, just a bit faster.

Vadim Antonov
DEMOS, Moscow, USSR