es

[Tony Kimball <address@hidden>]

Quoth Vladimir G Ivanovic on Tuesday, 11 December:
: What do people think of `es', the `rc' derivative? (`rc' is the Unix
: port of the Plan 9 shell.).

es was my login shell for several years, but i had to add
mathematical operators into it, in order make it usable from my point
of view.  It felt like writing scheme without parens, and much as I
love those little fluttering albatrosses, they're not really of much
use in a unix shell, so that's no critique.  You could write
delightfully abstract and functional code in es, but syntax was a bit
more obtrusive than even a quandam Lisper could overlook, and I do
think pipes could have been better integrated with streams,
conceptually (although I know that they were identical at the root, in
the implementation).