I was going to say, 30 years ago, the 1st edition of the actual Plan 9 wasn't yet released (not until 1992), much less a clone/port of its shell. But it seems that Byron Rakitzis wrote his Unix clone of `rc` in 1991 before Plan 9 was even out! He based it on Tom Duff's paper which described Plan 9's shell.
(Plan 9's `rc` was originally written for 10th edition Unix, and would later get ported back to Unix as part of Russ Cox's plan9port in 2003.)
Yes, I did! I used Duff's paper as a reference, and relied on the good taste of all my beta testers to guide me towards a working shell. Back when source code was distributed via shar files in an email.
Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace
by PeterWhittaker on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @04:12PM
(#26559820)
Thanks for writing rc! I’d forgotten about Duff’s paper and the exact circumstances of rc’s release until I read LukeShu’s and your replies.
I had a lot of fun with rc....
It's hosted on github now and still serves as the login shell for me and presumably many others!
At that point, I needed muscle memory across all machines more than anything else, and switched back to sh (bash was still very new and not widely available, csh was born borked, and ksh was only available under certain OSes). That was sad.
rc had a beautiful, clean C-like syntax without any csh weirdness and was much more powerful than sh. Scripts were a joy to write and maintain.