ast

Bell Labs had a simpler alternative in IFFE [0], that consisted of a single shell script [1]. You would specify any required headers, libraries and tests in a simple text file [2]. [0] https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/glenn-fowler/iffe... [1] https://github.com/att/ast/blob/master/src/cmd/INIT/iffe.sh [2] https://github.com/att/ast/blob/master/src/cmd/3d/features/s...

The implicit point of comparison looks to be the monolithic Unix of old, where the entirety of the code of the system is (hopefully, ostensibly, allegedly) developed with a single vision, except for the application programs in the narrowest sense of the word (e.g. the particular piece of numerics you needed to design your airplane or whatnot, but not the editor you used to write it, the cluster scheduler you used to run it, the typesetter you used to write down your results, or the 3D viewer you used to present them). As far as I understand, that—compared to the Linux distro which derives a similar range of capability from a primordial soup of small nuggets of software—was Raymond’s “cathedral” as well, and the original model of the BSDs, before the range of expected functionality was broad enough that distro-ish “ports” became unavoidabl

tw from AT&T AST has C-like syntax. https://github.com/att/ast/blob/master/src/cmd/tw/tw.c#L182

Aha, I shall have a dig through https://github.com/att/ast/tree/master/src/lib/libtksh then. Thank you kindly.

https://github.com/att/ast There's not really much to it; it's just an example of extending ksh with more builtins, which is simple by design. (I really miss what this did for Sun's dbx debugger — instead of being inside some tool with yet another idiosyncratic command language, your shell just grew commands for interacting with the process being debugged.)

"If anyone knows of a shell which meets my criteria of being lightweight but with command history and tab completion (paths, command names and command arguments), I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Otherwise I may have to look into extending dash or something." I would also love to know the answer to this question. I am a big fan of shells and shell programming in general and POSIX shell in particular. Only suggestion I currently have is ksh, of which there are a few implementations, ksh93 still developed (https://github.com/att/ast), pdksh from OpenBSD (of which there is a portable version here: https://github.com/ibara/oksh) and MirBSD ksh (https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm). Otherwise of interest is mrsh: https://github.com/emersion/mrsh which was recently mentioned by Drew DeVault in a blog post linked here: https://news.ycombinator

Recently mailing lists hosted by AT&T research have stopped working. These lists were used by ksh developers and users, so I am looking for an alternative[1]. Since the issue I opened on GitHub did not generate much public interest, I would like to ask this question to HN crowd. Which mailing list providers do you use and why? [1] https://github.com/att/ast/issues/1013

Apologies, I forgot to include a link: The toolkit is now at https://github.com/att/ast since AT&T laid off the group a couple years ago. About half the package consists of evolutions of traditional Unix commands. The parts I use regularly are ksh and tw. tw ('tree walk') is sort of a 'find --exec' replacement with a C-like selector syntax. It's a bit verbose, so for interactive use I generally set up project-specific shell aliases with selection expressions, e.g. alias cctw=$'tw -e "select: return (type == REG) && ((name == \'*.c\') || (name == \'*.h\') || (name == \'*.cpp\') || (name == \'*.cc\') || (name == \'*.h\') || (name == \'*.hpp\') || (name == \'*.mm\') || (name == \'*.inc\'));" ' and then use those, e.g. cctw egrep -w MyIdentifier