Greg Wooledge <g...@wooledge.org> writes: > Partly true. seq(1) is a Linux thing, and was never part of any > tradition, until Linux people started doing it.
Huh. I started with Ultrix, and then SunOS, but don't remember learning seq at a later date. > (Before POSIX, it involved using expr(1) for every increment, which > is simply abominable.) And let's not forget the original "glob"! But my point is that using external programs to do minor processing tasks has a long history in shells. > but beyond a certain > point, trying to force a shell to act like a Real Programming Language > is just not reasonable. I've never tracked down why, but the Perl executable is a lot smaller than the Bash executable. So it's likely that turning a shell into a Real Programming Language is also likely to be unusually expensive. Dale
