ksh seems to be able to much, maybe all, of what you want

http://www.kornshell.com/doc/ksh93.html

It's not blind loyalty - I have no loyalty as far as any piece of software is concerned. Bash has done what I wanted it to do, and what it was designed to do.

Gee Whiz. I'm only calling for a better standard in toys.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, Johnnie. I'll take a look at the Korn shell.

No, you're not. You asking for my lego building blocks to
be remodeled into some of those aircraft or other lumps that
limit my creativity by having everything ready-made, and
that have less generic usability, or come at the cost of
size and performance hits :}



Cheers,
Tink

This thread is nuts.....

BASH is just one one of a bazillion tools available on a typical Linux system. Don't like it?---don't use it. If you have serious suggestions for changing it, contact the authors.

I imagine that shells---like any other SW--evolve to meet specific needs. As someone already pointed out, a big part of the evolution of BASH was about system startup and configuration. That did not require floating point math. Further---in the true Unix modular paradigm---there is no need to add FP--there are other utilities available.

*Hic!* I'll have what he's having... *Hic!*

Nothin' like a lonesome Sunday night to turn the entire crowd into philosophers and pundits . . .

Hello

The *n*x shells and their programming facilities originated when people were using teletypes to interface with computers and so were optimised for that environment. Teletypes were slow, some hundreds of bps, so the shells emphasise brevity over legibility.

They are command shells meaning they are primarily to help the user run commands. Their programming facilities are primarily to help the user automate running commands. Hence they are not designed to be complete languages in themselves but optimised to use *n*x commands such as bc, cat, sed, grep ... . The pipeline and "command substitution" are a powerful features in this regard.

Happily the shell designers were very smart cookies with the result that shellscript became a very flexible and powerful tool, capable of much more than its original design objectives. Hence they are still in wide use, 40 years after they started.

Not surprising, then, that shellscript does not compare well as an all-purpose general programming laguage such as C, or as a mathematical language such as FORTRAN, or as a GUI language etc.

It's "horses for courses"; Dobbin the Shire horse does not go well over the fences and Red Rum is a lousy ploughing horse.

Best

Charles

Duh. It's too obvious why shells were created... unless

Btw, bash now in its new version 4.0 appears to be more powerful than ksh but still has some bugs or limitations related to coprocess.

Also comparing bash, ksh and zsh, zsh seems to be the most powerful and is very compatible with module oriented shell scripting.

Just my opinion.

Ok, fair enough. I can see in the context of its origin and evolution, I've been a bit unduly harsh on Bash. Sorry, guys. :-)

We'll forgive you...but don't do it again.

OP, you don't know shit about Bash.

I think CompletelyClueless just wants someone to respond to him.
Not to mention, if you think something is a kludge, write a better one.

Can't tell but regardless, this thread he started seemed fun. It's funny if you don't look at it seriously. ^^,

Your login name is appropriate... CompletelyClueless.

Request you to get some clues and then google it. I have around 3 years of experience in shell scripting, did not find any harm in it.