Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!sunic!bmc!kuling!jand
From: jand@kuling.UUCP (Jan Dj{rv)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl != shell (was: Patch 9 from outer space)
Summary: No more...
Message-ID: <1422@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 28 Feb 90 08:02:54 GMT
References: <15178@bfmny0.UU.NET> <7105@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Reply-To: jand@kuling.UUCP (Jan Dj{rv)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 47

In article <15188@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes:
>In article <7113@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:
>>You might say that you want it to act as if it were a shell.  But what if
>>you say
>>
>> 	perl -c "myscript.pl arg1 arg2 | myotherscript.pl arg1 arg2"
>>
>>Should perl handle that?  How much shell syntax do I put into perl?
>
>I suppose it'd be a royal PITA to add that kind of thing.  All I can point
>out is that if it WERE added, Perl would come that much closer to being
>the universally flexible shell it's already darn close to now.
>

IMHO Larry has done enough by letting perl understand the #! construct.
This should really be understood by the kernel, not by programs like perl.
(Anybody know what POSIX has to say about this ?).

I suppose perl doesn't do the #! trick on set[ug]id scripts?

Instead of putting shell syntax into perl there must be other things
people wan't to see in perl.

I'd like to have some basic tty diciplines as builtins in perl.
Things like CBREAK and ECHO modes would help a lot.
(Save's me from creating a ioctl/termio[s]/sgtty for each machine :-).

NOTE: I'll settle for those two things, this could get out of hand if
something more complicated was attempted. If you wan't to do something more
complicated, you can do it by ioctl.

A basic curses interface would be nice also (move, clear and standout
would be enough) but this is perhaps asking to much.

I realise that this things would promote perl as a shell, but this is
not my intention. I wan't to do fancier reports (peRl ?).


There must be other things people would like to see in perl, or is perl
already perfect (Perfect Extraction and Report Language :-) ?


Feedback wanted,

	Jan D.