From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-08-29T15:19:37+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby shell?

On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 08:17:36AM +0900, Terry Poulin wrote:
> Marc Heiler wrote:
> 
> > A shell would be much more of a mundane task ;-)
> >
> 
> I once tried to write a shell in Ruby as a toy project in my
> ~/Programming/Ruby directory but got bored...
> 
> If it had not all ready been largely done in C, Perl, Lisp, and KornShell
> versions I'd probably work on a shell and posix oriented userland for fun.

I wonder why irb isn't good enough.  Why not use that, if you need a Ruby
shell?  Using chpass on FreeBSD to set a shell to irb[1] (for instance)
works just fine and, while I haven't tried it, I'm sure you can set a
user's default shell to irb on Linux just as easily.

My experience with irb and psh is that psh is a much more annoying shell
than irb.  In fact, if I didn't prefer working in the standard shell for
any given Unix or Unix-like OS, I'd probably be using either irb or
(maybe) esh as my shell a lot of the time.

Okay, now that I've thought about it, maybe irb isn't ideal -- if only
because stuff like executing ls would require something like the
following:

  > puts `ls`

. . . or:

  > system 'ls'

That could get annoying after a while.  Okay, ignore what I said -- if
you want a Ruby shell, I guess you need one other than irb.  Now that I
think about it, esh has some annoyances with the parentheses
requirements for all native commands, too.

Damn.  I'm not sure there was really a point to this email at all, now.
I'll go ahead and spam the list with it anyway, though, since I went to
all the trouble of typing it.


[1]: . . . assuming, of course, you have the path to irb specified in the
/etc/shells file.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Ben Franklin: "As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others
we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of
ours, and this we should do freely and generously."