Re:Shell Has a Forth-Like Quality
by chubot on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @02:49AM
(#13479561)
I like the answer yumaikas gave. I would say that the shell IS what you're saying: a REPL for a programming language. But it is a weird programming language.
The language has evolved with compatibility since the original release in 1971, before it had loops, conditionals, or functions. That's before yacc and probably before some common parsing algorithms were even invented. It is a proper programming language by now, but it just feels old and crufty.
I think it needs a few more OS bindings as well. The "test -f / -d" stuff is a little impoverished.
The language has evolved with compatibility since the original release in 1971, before it had loops, conditionals, or functions. That's before yacc and probably before some common parsing algorithms were even invented. It is a proper programming language by now, but it just feels old and crufty.
I think it needs a few more OS bindings as well. The "test -f / -d" stuff is a little impoverished.