[Haskell-cafe] develop new Haskell shell?

[Donn Cave]

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

> Funny this should come up. We've just had several submissions to work on
> a functional shell for the google summer of code.
> 
> Here's a bit of a summary of what's been done in Haskell I prepared a
> while back.
> 
> http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pls/thesis-topics/functionalshell.html

My background is more shells than FP, so I'm not sure what to make
of this - if we're talking about doing things for educational purposes,
or serious attempts to make a viable alternative to ... something.
At any rate, for anyone thinking about writing a UNIX shell, here are
two items that might be worth reading:

 http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

   A rant about the failings of csh.  Particularly note the first
   topic about file descriptors - if you think the UNIX file
   descriptor system (the numbers, dup2(), etc.) is quaint but
   not worth taking very seriously, then you have a lot in common
   with other people interested in higher level languages (Bill
   Joy wrote csh) but probably should not be writing a UNIX shell.
   Tom C. has been doing this rant longer than he has been doing Perl.

 http://cm.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/rc.pdf

   The Plan 9 shell.  Plan 9 comes from the inventors of UNIX, and
   its shell is one of the few really good ones.  There's a UNIX
   implementation, whose author also collaborated on "es", which
   another pretty interesting shell, I see it's mentioned on the
   UNSW web page.

Plus a bonus one for the functional connection - I can't find any 
detailed information about it, but several years ago the next
generation Amiga was going to have an FP shell.  Here's an article,
not in English, sorry, but isn't Italian a beautiful language!

http://www.quantum-leap.it/default_frame.asp?id=30

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com