Re: mksh import

[Alex Goncharov <alex-goncharov%comcast.net@localhost>]

,--- der Mouse (Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:43:26 -0500 (EST)) ----*
| > I think that it would be good to have at least one modern shell in
| > our base, [...]
| What meaning of "modern" are you using here?
,--- David Young (Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:00:43 -0600) ----*
| What is it that you mean by "modern shell" ?
`------------------------------------------------------*

Let me try to offer you a user's perspective.

I spend a significant part of my work day at shell prompts, working
with various OSes.  Another noticeable part of my time is spent
writing shell scripts.

And, any day of the week, I could say, "Thank God, Bash exists!.."

I don't care much (remember, I am a user, not an OS provider, which
would be a different story) about the strict /bin/sh or POSIX.N
compatibility.  Neither I, nor most of the (very skilled) people
around myself would be able to correctly explain what that means.

With Bash, I have a uniform and extremely efficient environment for
both command line manipulation and scripting; I don't have to use one
shell for the former and another for the latter -- thus, I can perfect
my shell mastery all the time, naturally.  I can use (or build) Bash
on any of the many platforms I work with -- and the same version of it
will behave the same elsewhere.  It also helps that Bash is:

  * Constantly evolving, adding new powerful features;

  * Extremely well documented;

  * Probably (a.k.a. "in my experience") has fewer bugs than Ksh
    implementations.

These days I only rarely have to use Perl to do something I cannot
easily do in Bash with a small mix-in of Awk and Sed.

Excluding Zsh, which I have never used, would I be able to do that
kind of scripting in any other shell?  Maybe in Ksh... some of
it... struggling with bugs and learning more and more "don't do this"
rules.

Would any of those shell lend me an interactive environment with at
least 50% of what Bash gives me?  No way.

This is what "modern" means for me, "just a user".

(I don't know if Bash executes loops slower than /bin/sh -- any
difference here doesn't matter for me; maybe slower, maybe faster but
no reason for me even to measure.)

BTW, I had never heard of Mksh before this discussion came to be.
Then glanced through the documentation at MirOS Web site -- Mksh
seems interesting to me, that's all I can say.

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov%comcast.net@localhost --