From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@...>
Date: 2000-08-08T16:48:05+01:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:04352] Re: Thirty-seven Reasons [Hal Fulton] Love[s] Ruby

On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, David Douthitt wrote:

> REASON 29
> 29.  It can be used interactively. Conceivably it could be used as a
> sort of "Kornshell squared."
> 
> Oh, really?  I don't know..... ksh can do a LOT.  And what about scsh (Scheme Shell)?  Another language for me to learn :-)

This one jarred me as well.  tclsh has the property that undefined
commands are searched for on the user's PATH...
brains hgs 161 %> tclsh    
% ls
Enumeration.rb       index.html           take_two_procs.rb
Enumeration_test.rb  indexblob.rb         take_two_procs2.rb
attributes2.rb       nestedyields.rb      timed_read.rb
display_diffs.rb     partial_nesting.rb   udpclient.rb
docs_in_here_doc.rb  ruby-man-1.4         udpserver.rb
gnudecode.rb         self_print.rb
gnudecode2.rb        sort_lines.rb
% exit
brains hgs 162 %> 

but
 
irb(main):002:0> ls
NameError: undefined local variable or method `ls' for #<Object:0xea118>
(irb):2:in `irb_binding'

I don't think we would want this to work like a shell straight out of the
box, but a "proper" ruby shell might be nice.

	Hugh
	hgs@dmu.ac.uk