On Tue, Jan 01, 2013 at 02:13:14PM +1100, Daniel Bryan wrote: > Bash is my go-to for system scripting, but for something that will run > 100% of the time on my system for years it's not over-engineering to do > it efficiently.
It would be nice to extend C with suitable function and macro libraries, and a little new syntax (can be done with a pre-processor) so that we could write compact code in C as in shell. Try setting up a shell pipeline in C, and you'll see what I mean. There's no reason it should be more difficult to do stuff in a compiled language, we barely ever use truely dynamic stuff like "eval" or varibles by name in the shell anyway. Combined with a good quick compiler or interpreter, we could get a real "C shell" into the bargain. tinycc for example is well fast enough to be used in an interactive REPL as if it were an interpreter; and that's without any attempt to optimize by pre-loading headers or whatever. Sam
