5 ms·

You think these are zingers, but they're really just worthy of cringing. a) Red herring. No one is talking about a reference implementation of Unix shells, but

You think these are zingers, but they're really just worthy of cringing. a) Red herring. No one is talking about a reference implementation of Unix shells, but about Korn shell compatibility in particular. b) Red herring. Don't imply it's a Korn or Korn-compatible shell - that's the issue here. c) Red herring. Though the conversation was never recorded, it's implied that nothing was said about "portability", per se, but in particular compatibility with the Korn shell language specification. d) Red herring and an insult. Stephen Bourne didn't write the first Unix shell. Ken Thompson did. Is your implication that no one should iterate or create new designs? Microsoft creating a Unix shell is fine, but the issue at hand is that it wasn't a Korn shell like they claimed it to be.

kazinator 11y ago
Microsoft wasn't creating anything; they were working with MKS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKS_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKS_Inc MKS claimed to have a Korn-shell workalike, AFAIR. > The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well which sounds reasonable, and isn't an assertion that MKS has the Korn shell in it such that it is 100% compatible. (And could anything even be 100% compatible, if not running on Unix? The Korn shell source ported to DOS woudln't be 100% compatible with the Korn shell, just "pretty compatible" so that many things work "quite well".) They probably had some good reasons to with MKS, because in fact it isn't easy to port a shell: not to the DOS environment. Or Windows. The minimal example of doing this reasonably well might today be the MSYS environment used by MinGW, which has to re-create significant infrastructure (a whole C library from the ground up and other things). Maybe Microsoft also had favorable licensing with MKS, avoiding the AT&T license.

kazinator 11y ago

Microsoft wasn't creating anything; they were working with MKS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKS_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKS_Inc MKS claimed to have a Korn-shell workalike, AFAIR. > The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well which sounds reasonable, and isn't an assertion that MKS has the Korn shell in it such that it is 100% compatible. (And could anything even be 100% compatible, if not running on Unix? The Korn shell source ported to DOS woudln't be 100% compatible with the Korn shell, just "pretty compatible" so that many things work "quite well".) They probably had some good reasons to with MKS, because in fact it isn't easy to port a shell: not to the DOS environment. Or Windows. The minimal example of doing this reasonably well might today be the MSYS environment used by MinGW, which has to re-create significant infrastructure (a whole C library from the ground up and other things). Maybe Microsoft also had favorable licensing with MKS, avoiding the AT&T license.