On Wednesday 07 December 2016 10:37, BartC wrote: > On 06/12/2016 21:44, Gregory Ewing wrote: >> BartC wrote: > >>> And the justification? Well, %ENVIRONMENTVARIABLE% gets converted in >>> Windows, so why not?! >> >> No, the justification is that the Unix convention allows >> the shell to provide certain useful functions that Unix >> users value. >> >> If you don't want those functions, you're free to write >> your own shell that works however you want. Complaining >> that everyone *else* should want the same things you >> want is not reasonable. > > How does that work? > > Suppose I provide an assortment of applications that would work better > if wildcards are expanded. > > Do I then have to provide one more application, a shell, to be run first > if someone wants to run any of my applications? Which they then have to > quit if they want to run some other programs that depend on wildcard > expansion.
Your question is ambiguous. If we're talking about Greg's tongue-in-cheek suggestion that you write your own shell, then the answer is, it depends entirely on you. This bartshell that doesn't expand wildcards is your baby, doing what *you* want it to do. So its your decision. But I can tell you that by far the majority of Unix programs don't do their own globbing, or even offer it as an opt-in optional feature. Why would they need to? So if you want bartshell to be usable on Linux/Unix systems, you'll need some sort of opt-in setting to enable wildcard expansion. > (Actually at this point I haven't got a clue as to how Unix applications > are distributed. I guess it's not as simple as just providing a binary > executable. For the moment, I'm using C source code as every Unix system > has a C compiler. I suppose it could be Python source too, but I doubt > if my interpreters written in Python will run quite as briskly -- bash is about an order of magnitude slower than Python, and its still plenty fast enough for practical work. > I find C slow enough for this purpose.) http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html -- Steven "Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere." - Jon Ronson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
