ignatz (10/30/82)
I've got this little idea that won't go away. Have you ever, for some reason or another, written a shellscript that ran away? Instead of 10 or 20 lines, it ended up 250? It may really do what you want, but *ghod*, is it slow, and a drain on the system? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to feed it to a program, and have that program generate a 'C' source file to do the same thing? Has anyone done this? I've really looked at the problem, and there's a reasonable amount of work involved if the thing is to be much more than a compiled set of "system" calls. Please reply directly to me... Thnx in advnc, Dave Ihnat ihuxx!ignatz
RSanders.Pascalx@Usgs2-Multics@sri-unix (11/16/82)
Date: 11 November 1982 18:11 mst Funny you should mention a shell compiler. Two days ago, John Mashey from Bell Labs gave a talk here in Palo Alto entitled 'Software Army on the March'. One of the projects he described was a product written for the operating companies with something like 25,000 lines of shell script. He said they looked long and very hard at a shell compiler, and did some measurements. They found that even monster shell scripts spend most of their time in the called programs, and writing a compiler would not be worth the effort. BTW, I highly recommend his talk to anyone involved in large (or even medium) scale software projects.