On Fri, 27 Jun 1997, David Miles wrote: > I appreciate your response. > > Another question or so: > > 1) Are shells geared toward specific tasks?... such as program creation, a > shell built to specifically offer enhanced compiling and program > generation capabilities? another perhaps for graphics of some sort? >
Your question is not speciific enough to provide a focused response to. In a sense there are two forms of shell. Group 1: The first is written to be generic enough to enable the user to do program execution of any sort. The bash, sh, csh and ksh shells belong to this group. Some offer enhancements in the form of simple control of flow statements and looping mechanisms. These along with shell variables form a simple programming environment. Many of these shells (sh and bash are two) come standard with many linux distributions (sh in fact comes ``standard'' - of sorts - with most unix like systems). This forms the basis for many simple unix tools on the basis that it is far faster and easier since we can write scripts in a shell's defined language and have a shell execute them. Of note is that a shell's programming language is augmented by unix commands and utilities. Group 2: You will find some rather task enhanced shells in this category. Some would call these intepreters - and this is open for debate. Of note is the wish shell for tcl/tk development. And then we get emacs - which is probably the most generalised task oriented shell available - also open for debate. Note - to each his some. Some people do use emacs as their root environment. Others (me included) use it to code and document. Most other things are relegated to another shell (once again, in my case this is bash). I don't know of any shells oriented to graphics display but maybe gnuplot can be classified as such (assuming we take plotting to be graphics). So you see - in answering your question I left muuch more open. It's not a simple one. To some shells define a working environment. To others they're just a program that allows you to do things. One thing is important though: Shells need to be interactive tools (and thus most likely relegated to the intepreter based class of apps). They must provide an environment in which a user can get the job done. Cheers, |----| Poobalan Murphy Arumugam |----| | <> | Tel: +27 11 463 7509 | <> | | || | Fax: +27 11 463 8199 | || | | || | http://www.murphypa.co.za/ | || | | <> | work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | <> | | || | other: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | || | | || | personal: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | || | | <> | http://www.murphypa.co.za/pgp | <> | |----|-----------------------------------|----| |pgp | not yet | pgp| |---------------------------------------------| | Linux -> Spoil Your Computer __ Ward Bekker | |---------------------------------------------| ^^^ Still not :-) with this ^^^ -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
