On Feb 26, 2000, "Gary V. Vaughan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> making it relatively similar to bourne shell wouldn't hurt since that
> is already a known quantity, and will be easier for maintainers to get
> to grips with
In fact, if we could keep it fully compatible with (a subset of)
Bourne shell would be great. We might start by using shell functions,
for example. Akim Demaille claims that there's no system in which one
can't find a shell that doesn't support functions, even if that
involves searching for alternatives automatically. In case we can't
find such a shell, we could always make scripts out of the shell
functions, and use them instead.
Then, we could try to use enough of a subset of portable shell with
functions so as to make it easily translatable to portable C. I
believe it can be done, if we factor out enough of the low-level shell
constructs into functions our translator would recognize.
In this case, porting libtool to C, for the benefit of speed, wouldn't
be that painful: it'd be just a matter of writing an appropriate
translator. Not that it would be easy, but it wouldn't require us to
re-implement everything from scratch, and we would just have to keep
in sync the function definitions with their C-based counterparts.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Enjoy Guaranį
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company aoliva@{redhat, cygnus}.com
Free Software Developer and Evangelist CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp
oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} Write to mailing lists, not to me
