Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

On Nov 17, 2021, at 11:12 AM, Norman Wilson &lt;norman(a)oclsc.org&gt; wrote: and tcl, rc etc. I just want better builtin support for shell pipelines as they are essentially (flat) list processors! As an example consider something like the following: find . -name '*.[hc]' -type f | \ xargs grep -l '\<foo\>' /dev/null | \ xargs grep -l '\<bar\>' /dev/null | \ xargs some-command Just to run some-command on all *.[hc] files with words foo & bar. And this will fall apart if there are spaces or : in filenames. Basically most scripts are about enumerating, filtering, converting and processing. If files, especially text files, are so central to unix, a shell should know about them and provide common operations on them. One can even think of shell variables as files (sort of like the env device in plan9). If you want to name some sub-computation instead of processing it all in one pipeline, it should be trivial but it isn't; you have to find uniq names for these temp files and remember to delete them when done. I want lexically scoped variables (aka files) that disappear once you exist the scope! The difficulty is in coming up with an intuitive, regular & a relatively concise syntax. Even so it would likely be unpopular since people seem to prefer for-loops!