OT: The Straight Dope

[Nick Vargish]

Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> writes:

>         Though, if I may drag in some decade old history, tcsh was quite 
> comfortable to someone used to the Amiga's CLI -- no experience with 
> actual scripting, but at the interactive level when I had a shell 
> account with Netcom, using tcsh minimized confusion between the two 
> systems.

Right, tcsh wasn't bad as an interactive shell; until zsh showed up,
it was probably the best choice since it had a number of features that
sh lacked (filename completion being the big one, but the history
facilities were handy too).

The papers cited by other posters, which I was too lazy to google for,
are mostly arguments against programming in (t)csh.

It's nice to be able to write off-the-cuff scripts on the command line
in the same language you write your system admin scripts in. That's
why zsh and bash are so great -- all the interactive features of tcsh
(and more!) in a regular and sane Bourne syntax.

Nick

-- 
#  sigmask  ||  0.2  ||  20030107  ||  public domain  ||  feed this to a python
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),' Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAcboefstobudi/psh?')