Scsh?

[Christian Lynbech on satellite]

I heard a talk with Olin Shivers about scsh, so heres a few points I
picked up (and this will be as I understood it, you mileage may vary
:-).

Scsh is not (supposed to be) an interactive shell environment. They
are looking into building that on top of it, but this is not what they
consider the main point.

The main point is what they call `process notation' which is a way to
describe and start process handling stuff like forking and connecting
input/output. It is also a philosophical project, attacking for
instance the "little languages" concept of UNIX.

So scsh is more like a scripting language that combine the power of
scheme s a programming language with a real interface to the UNIX OS,
such that one do get the power of UNIX in the scheme world. They got
some nifty examples such as how to implement an awk like facility,
using scheme.

A good deal of work has gone into finding out what the process
notation should look like and how to map UNIX abstractions (such as
file handles) into a garbage collected (scheme) environment.

Its pretty UNIX'oid in its view of the world but worth a study for
anybody interested in integrating an OS with a highlevel language like
Scheme.


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Christian Lynbech          | Telebit Communications A/S                       
                           | Fabrikvej 11, DK-8260 Viby J                 
Phone: +45 8628 8176       | email: chl@tbit.dk --- URL: http://www.tbit.dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)