Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 01:50:33 -0500 From: Jim Bryant <kc5vdj@yahoo.com> To: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> Cc: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.ORG>, kris@obsecurity.org, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why is csh tcsh? This can be a bad thing... Message-ID: <3B874AB9.2090702@yahoo.com> References: <20010825053016.D17363810@overcee.netplex.com.au>
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Peter Wemm wrote: > Jordan Hubbard wrote: > >>>Because of certain differences, it cannot be used wholesale as a >>>replacement for csh. >>> >>Then please enumerate them so that they can be given due attention. >>This is exactly the sort of detailed feedback that was requested when >>we first raised the issue of switching over, and nobody could come up >>with any concrete differences that would cause harm, so the deed was >>done. >> > > We switched for several reasons: > 1: csh script interface sucks > 2: csh user interface sucks > 3: tcsh user interface is one of the better ones. > > csh is not a serious scripting language and hardly anybody ever uses it as > one in scripts that have sufficient complexity to notice the difference. > > As far as user interfaces go, tcsh is as close to a superset as you can > get. That was a step up for the majority of users who actually use it and > it is still "close enough" that built-in finger knowledge works as > expected. > > We made "genuine" csh available as a port in case somebody *has* to have > it for actual scripting that was impossible to tweak to run under tcsh. > (see ports/shells/44bsd-csh). > > Cheers, > -Peter Okay, at least this is the closest I've come to hearing an explaination... I was never arguing the utility of tcsh as an interactive shell, hell, like I said, I've ran it since it first appeared on comp.sources.unix.[misc?] many years ago, and use it as my shell of choice on any platform. My question was on the need to turn it into csh, when just including it in the /bin directory as tcsh was enough. I have been reading up on some of the old well-known diffs, and apparently many HAVE been fixed over the years, but as the gentleman who explained his experience earlier in this thread will attest, not all are fixed. For 4.4, the point is moot, if this is the way it is, this is the way it will ship [next week?]... For 5.0, I maybe the black sheep in saying this, but I'd like to see /bin/csh be the real thing for 5.0. By all means, leave tcsh in /bin, but for the sake of backwards compatability, IMHO `ln /bin/tcsh /bin/csh` was a bad idea. jim -- ET has one helluva sense of humor! He's always anal-probing right-wing schizos! _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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