> Well, I was only giving my personal opinion. I've never used irb, but > it seems to me that using any sort of OO tool as a shell would be "cruel > and unusual", but I guess it takes all kinds, and I certainly wouldn't > prevent you from enjoying yourself, same as I'd expect from you to mine.
The "OO" nature of it really really does not come into play here as far as I can tell. Whatever you can imagine with perl/python/your-favorite-language is very likely as much possible, if not more so, with Ruby. Certainly if writing something elaborate it comes into play, but then we are away from the shell aspect of the discussion. Doing: system "myfile" does not become any more obnoxious just because "myfile" happens to be an object in a well-defined class-based object system. Nor does the function definition: def myfun(param) ... end Become obnoxious just because Ruby happens to be OO, for some definition of OO. My main concern is syntax. I would love to have a shell based on Ruby, Lisp, or some other powerful language (anything that at least allows functions to return values other than status codes... please). But I have yet to find one that makes it maximally simple and efficient to do the common stuff that you use interactively - which is to run external processes. scsh (Scheme Shell) comes pretty close; I have no objection to using it for shell *scripting*. Neither might Ruby be an issue with sufficient API support. But I am not sure about using it interactively. When interactive, you don't want to type even a single annoying character more than you have to. Or at least I don't. That said, scsh might be possible to tweak sufficiently. It actually manages to combine the power of Lisp with the convenience of shell scripting pretty well (as always, by using macros). So you have pretty low-overhead syntax like. For example, instead of: more myfile You have: (run (more myfile)) If you imagine an interactive mode where a top-level (run (...)) would be implied (under certain circumstances), you could make that be exactly equivalent to the normal shell version: more myfile This is true even with parameters; the macros are such that you need not explicitly make them strings (so "(run (ls -l /))" is valid for example). I especially like the integration as soon as you want to do something slightly intelligent. E.g.: (run/strings (mystuff --list-something /path/to/db)) Yields an actual list of strings (one per line) that you can touch, pet and otherwise have your way with even if you want to do something other than piping it to the next process. Not to mention having higher order functions at your fingertips... In short, I would just love to have a single language for both tasks, not having to "switch" from one to the other after some threshold of script complexity. Unfortunately scsh has some issues (e.g., freebsd port is marked as broken om amd64 right now), so I dunno about counting on it being available everywhere. -- / Peter Schuller PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' Key retrieval: Send an E-Mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.scode.org
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