csh vs tcsh

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Derek D. Martin wrote:
|
| > And by the way, was is the advantage of using bash then?
|
| The advantage to using bash is that it is mostly compatible with the
| Bourne Shell, and the Korn Shell, and (AFAIK) 100% compatible with the
| POSIX shell (which is based on the Bourne and Korn shells).  The
| Bourne shell, or more recently the POSIX shell is the standard shell
| for system administration.  Knowing it is a Good Thing(tm).  Also,
| scripting in C shell is generally considered brain-damaged.

There's a good historic irony here.  Bill Joy  apparently  originally
wrote csh as an improved programming tool, and didn't intend it as an
interactive shell to replace sh. There have been a number of analyses
explaining  how  he failed on both goals.  For any number of reasons,
csh is much more difficult to use as a scripting  language  than  sh.
But  the  syntax  is  better than sh's for a human typist.  Also, csh
introduced a history mechanism that turns out to  be  easier  on  the
human brain than the different one introduced in ksh.  So csh and its
clones are widely preferred as an interactive shell, even  by  people
who write their shell scripts for sh or ksh or bash.

Of course, there are now even more people who prefer to use perl, tcl
or python when the script grows to a dozen lines or so. These are all
much better programming languages than any of the *sh interpreters.