Probably I'm talking shit here... or maybe this is something you are considering with sbase already... but I kept thinking about this.
Would it make sense to create a whole shell infrastructure based on little small commands? I mean, not just replacing no-brainer builtin things like "echo", etc, but also things like "if", "while", "for", "set", by doing system() calls to an extremelly minimal shell. Would it make sense? maybe even a command for creating pipes. It wouldn't be POSIX-conformant, but then just as long as the names don't conflict and the commands were available the script would run on normal shells too. Then you could have a damn small /bin/sh core that only takes care of finding things in PATH and doing variable and filename expansion. Then also you could get rid of some of the irregularities in shell syntax that make it kind of weird for something that should be so simple. Would this make sense or would it be extremely inefficient and stupid? -- Fernando
