LWN.net Logo

Advertisement

E-Commerce & credit card processing - the Open Source way!

Advertise here

Maybe re-run with Dash or Ash?

Posted Feb 5, 2007 18:26 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: Comparing Linux and Minix by marduk
Parent article: Comparing Linux and Minix

Ubuntu switched from Bash to Dash in Edgy to noticeably shorten boot times. Apparently booting involves forking a LOT of shells, and Bash is big, featureful, and slow (and has the most convoluted syntax of any programming language that I know -- including APL -- but I digress...)

If our esteemed editor still has his test rig set up, it might be interesting to see the shell tests re-run using Dash or Ash instead of Bash?


(Log in to post comments)

Maybe re-run with Dash or Ash?

Posted Feb 5, 2007 20:33 UTC (Mon) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

> (and has the most convoluted syntax of any programming language that I know -- including APL -- but I digress...)

Hey, APL's syntax is dead simple: evaluate right to left and functions are either monadic or dyadic (or niladic, I guess). The character set, on the other hand...

Maybe re-run with Dash or Ash?

Posted Feb 15, 2007 20:13 UTC (Thu) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

...and the syntax exceptions engendered by array indexing and assignments in APL.

Never fear, Iverson fixed this before his death with his magnum opus,
the chief successor to APL, "J" (www.jsoftware.com). And it uses only
ASCII characters in clever way. It is similar enough to APL to be
classifiable as a dialect.

Now if only this gang really understood the ecosystem of free software. A
free version (as in freedom, not as in beer, which is their current offering) is at the top of my wishlist in software.

Copyright © 2008, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
Powered by Rackspace Managed Hosting.