On 26 April 2017 at 08:08, Supragya Raj <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi HelenOS devel team, > > Since last two weeks, I have been working on TIcket #653(Enhancement: > Advanced shell scripting in Bdsh), solution of which I deem is HLang - a > shell scripting language. [...]
Hello Raj, your concept is quite interesting. I have some questions if you don't mind. 1) It seems to me that rather than a shell language in itself, your concept so far looks to me like a regular script language with some rather limited interaction with the actual shell. What makes a shell language different from just plugging in Lua with some system() calls, is that the integration with shell internals is seamless. Things like file handling, environment variables, pipes and process management, those are the important things, but you seem to be spending a lot of effort on the commonplace concepts, and much less on the shell-specific concepts. Maybe you could give more explanation and examples involving planned things you can't do with common scripting languages as easily? 2) Your syntax is somewhat unorthodox. In particular, using 'is' keyword to define key-value map pairs seems rather strange. Are you drawing inspiration from any existing language? Perhaps it would be better to stick with syntaxes that are familiar to your audience already; C/C++, Java, Python, etc. are all worthy of being inspired by, syntax-wise. 3) The website doesn't contain much detail on how any of it works. For example, what happens if you try to do arithmetic on a variable that's a random text? A more prescriptive documentation of your design would help others identify possible flaws early on. History tells us that it's very easy to lock all future use into a particular flawed choice made early on (example: all of unix ecosystem). _______________________________________________ HelenOS-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.modry.cz/listinfo/helenos-devel
