Unix Bugs and Suggestions

[edhall at rand-unix]

At least half of your complaints concerned problems with CSH.
After two years working with and learning about that monstrosity
I finally have to vent some steam over it.

The C-shell hardly deserves to be called `UNIX'.  It has a wealth
of features, each one not quite fully implemented and each with
an arcane syntax which, if it is similar to that of other features,
is just different enough to thwart the user's intuitions.  It is
clearly an effort of several individuals, each with their own `idea'
of what it should be.

The Bourne shell may not have some of the features, but it is clean
and elegant.  Its facilities don't seem to be at war with each other.
I almost always use it for scripts, as it seems to be much more of
a *programming language*.  By comparison, C-shell is just a grab-bag
of hacks.  (Useful hacks, to be sure...)

Don't get me wrong; I *use* C-shell as my interactive shell.  History,
job-control, and aliasing are all productive features for me.  But
someone, somewhere, has to have done a better job with them.

		-Ed Hall
		edhall at rand-unix
		decvax!randvax!edhall