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I've skimmed oilshell, but couldn't find what it does differently. It just says everywhere that it is a shell that can do shell work. If it is just a normal she
by fiatjaf 10y ago
I've skimmed oilshell, but couldn't find what it does differently. It just says everywhere that it is a shell that can do shell work. If it is just a normal shell, why would I want to use it instead of bash or others?
- dijit 10y agoMy understanding is that it's easier to understand a simple source tree, you can understand how the more complex shells work underneath. The author probably started it as a learning excercise.
- chubot 10y agoSee my reply -- that's why I posted it here, so people could see an example of the algorithms and data structures for shell, but that's not the purpose of the project.
- chubot 10y agoThe main thing is that it will be an entirely new programming language that you can convert bash scripts to. That's why I went to the trouble of writing a pretty complete bash parser as well as an executor. I mention that on the blog, but I haven't written about it a lot since I haven't implemented the language yet. It's designed with a big doc but not implemented yet. Have you ever written a completion function in bash? IMO it's kind of a nightmare. That should be one of the initial use cases for a better language. It would be closer to writing it in Python or ES6 rather than bash. If you just wanted to use sh syntax, then the reason you would use it is because it will have better parse errors and better runtime errors, which I talk about on my blog. But right now I don't actually expect anyone to use it, because it's in the early stages, like I say.