Re:Intercal, YAML, and Other Horrible Programming Languages
by chubot on Friday February 26, 2021 @06:33PM
(#26281113)
It should be usable for "cloud config" files long before that! :) But yes changing existing code at the lower distro level has a lot more inertia.
The cloud is basically built on top of Linux distros, so that part is easier to change and is rapidly evolving.
You could say that the = issue is deliberate, but I'd say the core problem is that shell didn't start out as a programming language, or at least it was a very impoverished one without variables.
The original paper from the 70's on the Thompson shell shows that. Shell had "goto" but no variables! So name=value had to be grafted on later without breaking too many things. Words were already split by spaces, so I guess they just made
name=value
a "pseudo-word" that becomes an assignment, whereas
The cloud is basically built on top of Linux distros, so that part is easier to change and is rapidly evolving.
You could say that the = issue is deliberate, but I'd say the core problem is that shell didn't start out as a programming language, or at least it was a very impoverished one without variables.
The original paper from the 70's on the Thompson shell shows that. Shell had "goto" but no variables! So name=value had to be grafted on later without breaking too many things. Words were already split by spaces, so I guess they just made
a "pseudo-word" that becomes an assignment, whereas remained 3 words.