3 ms·

What about, to gain saner semantics (static typing) while retaining the portability and versatility of shell scripts?

• chalst 5y ago
  Typical shell programming idioms are quite dynamic. You can give saner semantics, allowing a fair amount of static checking, without abandoning this dynamicity. What Andy Chu has been doing with Oil Shell is promising in this respect. It supports optional type annotations. Cf. https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html
• Brian_K_White 5y ago
  "What about, to gain saner semantics (static typing) while retaining the portability and versatility of shell scripts?" I think I was insufficiently critical in a misguided intention to be nice. Let me correct that a little :) If the need is great enough for a DSL, then the need is great enough for python or c or any of 100 other fully fledged universally available languages, and either require it's interpreter or ship a binary. However annoying it may be to require a ruby interpreter or something, there is essentially no case where the most sensible answer is this "Vala-for-sh". It's the worst of all worlds. Taking the whole life cycle into account, it's not saner or portable or versatile, it reduces all of those.