On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 01:11:26 +0530 Dan Cross <cro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 8:56 PM, erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net> wro= > > > perhaps (let's hope) someone else has better ideas. > > Well, something off the top of my head: Unix pipelines are sort of > like chains of coroutines. And they work great for defining linear > combinations of filters. But something that may be interesting would > be the ability to allow the stream of computations to branch; instead > of pipelines being just a list, make them a tree, or even some kind of > dag (if one allows for the possibility of recombining streams). That > would be kind of an interesting thing to play with in a shell > language; I don't know how practically useful it would be, though.
Coming up with an easy to use syntax for computation trees (or arbitrary nets) is the hard part. May be the time is ripe for a net-rc or net-scheme-shell. The feature I want is the ability to pass not just character values in environment or pipes but arbitrary Scheme objects. But that requires changes at the OS level (or mapping them to/from strings, which is a waste if both sides can handle structured objects).
