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Sorry but now it's my turn to not understand the point raised. Are you arguing that people should be allowed to explore other options outside of POSIX complianc
by laumars 9y ago
Sorry but now it's my turn to not understand the point raised. Are you arguing that people should be allowed to explore other options outside of POSIX compliance but except in this specific case?
It's pretty clear this shell isn't intended to follow in the footsteps of Bash, let alone be fully POSIX compliant, so I don't really understand why you are comparing it to them in terms of compatibility (and even more confused now that you've said you encourage people breaking POSIX).
Or is the point you're raising a question of what should be a builtin and what should not?
(happy to agree to disagree by the way; but I'm just a little confused as to what we are disagreeing about :))
- akkartik 9y agoBest kinds of conversations :) Set aside my mention of POSIX as a minor point. My basic claim is this: building a whole new shell is an ambitious act. Whether your goal is to create a better experience for others or just learn new skills, restricting yourself to what earlier shells happen to consider to be builtins is limiting ambition. Be more ambitious and rethink as much as you want. I'm not saying you have to rethink everything all at once all the way up from machine code (though I'm sympathetic to and experienced in that particular failure mode ^_^). I'm saying if you have an idea to improve 'cat' to fit better with your new shell, the fact that it's in coreutils shouldn't cause you pause. Who cares if it's a builtin in bash or not? Make it a builtin in your shell.
- laumars 9y agoAhh in that case I completely agree with you :)