Subject: Re: Shells in general
To: Steve Revilak <revilak@umbsky.cc.umb.edu>
From: Ken Nakata <knakata@itpjp.co.jp>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 10/13/1998 12:07:37
Steve Revilak wrote:
> 
> Not asking you to defend yourself, but rather because this is something I
> don't know and I'd like to :  What are the 'selling points' of the bourne
> shell variants.  OR, what are the disadvantages of the c-shell?

Ok, I don't have the URL handy, so go to http://altavista.digital.com,
oops, now http://www.altavista.com and search with three keys: csh
considered harmful.  You'll find several sites that carry the paper "Csh
Programming Considered Harmful".  It used to be a comparison between
Bourne sh and csh's scripting features and syntax, but it has evolved
into more of an anti-csh-scripting advocacy of some sort.  It no longer
recommends sh programming either; instead, it recommends other scripting
languages such as perl.  But the points still stand.

Quoting from earlier part of your post...

> I've always used csh or it's variant, tcsh.  Why?  NetBSD was my first
> exposure to unix, not quite a year ago.  My initial logins were as root,
> whose shell was set to /csh by default.  By the time I was able to set
> myself up as a user account for myself...I used csh just for the reason
> that I was used to it, moving to tcsh because it offered improvements.

Yes, this is exactly why I'm against shipping csh in the first place. 
Had you not been exposed to csh in the first place, you'd never have got
used to it.  Therefore you'd never even dreamt of writing csh scripts
(not that you are in fact writing scripts in csh).  I suspect most csh
scripts are written by people who've never used Bourne sh, who've never
been told that writing scripts in csh is a bad idea.

BTW: Yeah, I think csh sucks, but "we shouldn't ship csh with NetBSD"
was just a half serious.  I regret it didn't come across as such.  My
sense of humor leaves a lot to be desired, eh?

Ken