[ale] Re: Your scripting class

[David S. Jackson]

On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 05:53:38AM -0400 Geoffrey The Esoteric <esoteric at 3times25.net> wrote:
> >Yeah, I guess I'd better say that at the outset...although shell isn't
> >too bad of a "first language."  I guess it's not really a language
> >though.
> 
> Huh?  I guess that depends on your definition of language.  I would say 
> it's an interpreted programming language, but then again it's more then 
> that.

<for the new linux folks>

I believe what I was thinking of was that the shell depends upon many
other executables and is at least one step removed from an interpreted
programming language where you can build executables from scratch
without calling executables outside the language itself.  In that
respect, the shell simply executes a string of commands from the
commandline according to some logic you're able to supply to the
sequence of commands.

I think shell scripting languages are  different from other interpreted
languages in that other interpreted languages (such as perl and python)
don't necessarily depend on external programs to do their work: perl -e
'unlink /home/foo/filename' is different from 'rm /home/foo/filename' in
that 'unlink' is part of perl while 'rm' isn't strictly part of bash.  
(ie, perl -e 'unlink foo' doesn't call /bin/unlink.)

So when you learn bash (or whatever your shell scripting language is),
you really must learn not just the language structure and syntax itself,
but also the commands and switches of the external utilities you call,
such as grep, ls, rm, find, sed, and so on.  

</for the new linux folks>

-- 
David S. Jackson                        dsj at dsj.net
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy,
wealthy and dead.  -- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

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