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From: bouma@cs.purdue.EDU (William J. Bouma)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: fsh
Message-ID: <14284@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 91 04:45:14 GMT
References: <1991Apr10.233447.2614@bradley.bradley.edu>
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Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
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In article <1991Apr10.233447.2614@bradley.bradley.edu> pwh@bradley.bradley.edu (Pete Hartman) writes:
>Are there any Unix shells that are forth based?  Is there some really
>obvious reason why this would be [impractical|silly|stupid]?  Would anyone
>be interested?  I would think it would be interesting to do, and might
>be faster than the typical "script" approach to developing unix tools....

   Well, if it is "stupid", call me an idiot! 8^)

   It is difficult to mesh Forth and Unix together cleanly.  For
   example, it would be nice to use RPN for the Unix commands,
   but how can you do it without being messy?  It should be possible
   to pipe from unix commands into Forth words.  How would you do
   that?  Where do you get arguments for "aliased" unix commands
   and how do you specify them?

   What I am trying to say is that to do this right, unix commands
   should be indistinguishable from Forth words.  There should be no
   special syntax involved.  Tell me how to do this, and I will send
   you fsh.  I think if you try doing it, after a while you'll notice
   you no longer have the same Forth that everyone else in this group
   has.  In fact it will be difficult to convince some of them that
   what you have even is Forth. ;^)

   PS (yeah!)  I like the way you think Mr. Hartman.

-- 
Bill <bouma@cs.purdue.edu>