Re:A Lisp REPL as my main shell
by konjin on Monday February 08, 2021 @06:40AM
(#26063267)
Back at uni I ran an experimental lisp shell. A few notes of what was painful and what worked.
Outer most parens should be optional, if you're running ls you don't want to type (ls).
Grouping flags, files and options is difficult: ls -lh file could become (ls (h l) file) (ls (flags h l) (files file)) (ls -l -h file) (ls -lh file) none of the options are particularly good or lispy.
You need a full editor on the command line. Shells are designed for teletypes, lisps are designed for glass terminals.
All in all not I'm sure that an s-expression based system is the right fit for a low level interface to the computer. That said I did enjoy my experiments a lot more than I did using shells. Were I to try it again I would have it is a higher level language that compiles down to a shell.
Outer most parens should be optional, if you're running ls you don't want to type (ls).
Grouping flags, files and options is difficult: ls -lh file could become (ls (h l) file) (ls (flags h l) (files file)) (ls -l -h file) (ls -lh file) none of the options are particularly good or lispy.
You need a full editor on the command line. Shells are designed for teletypes, lisps are designed for glass terminals.
All in all not I'm sure that an s-expression based system is the right fit for a low level interface to the computer. That said I did enjoy my experiments a lot more than I did using shells. Were I to try it again I would have it is a higher level language that compiles down to a shell.