Bash programming enhancements - worthwhile?

Posted Aug 6, 2004 1:25 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
Parent article: Bash 3.0 released

If people have time to enhance Bash as a programming language, I'd sure rather they spend that time enhancing one of the languages that are already way ahead of Bash (Perl, Python, Java, whatever). Couldn't we let Bourne Shell (as a programming language) take its place in history?

On the other hand, I'll never get tired of new inventions in Bash as a command shell.

Bash programming enhancements - worthwhile?

Posted Aug 7, 2004 14:50 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Some of us like bash as a programming language too.

(comments below apply to python as well, I think).

You can't use perl in many environments, either because it isn't available, or because you're not allowed to replace an ancient and buggy module; perl has a hugely higher startup overhead than bash does; you can't sanely use perl scripts at system startup time; one-liners at the shell prompt tend to grow into scripts, and (at least for me) those one-liners are, well, bash scripting...

Yes, there is a reason to improve bash as a programming language. :)

Bash programming enhancements - worthwhile!

Posted Aug 10, 2004 14:44 UTC (Tue) by mwilck (subscriber, #1966) [Link]

The shell is superior to all of these if a program

doesn't handle complex data structures
carries out many file system activities like searching and moving files or manipulating text files
makes much use of command line programs e.g. from the Unix tool box

Maybe some time in the future all text files will be XML and the file system will be replaced by a CORBA interface to some data base. I hope that happens after I retire.

P.S. did you really mean Java ? Ever seen a shell that needs a 30MB VM to be loaded before it can print "hello world!" ?

Martin, not looking forward to object-oriented bash programming but still seeing room for enhancements.