csh vs tcsh

[dgavin at davegavin.com (Dave Gavin)]

 Check out Tom Christiansen's essay - "Csh Programming Considered Harmful"

  http://www.perl.com/pub/a/language/versus/csh.html

 A little old (1996), but still holds up pretty well. ;-)

 Dave Gavin

On Wed, 26 Feb 2003 12:42:13 -0500
"Scott Prive" <scottprive at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Yeah, I avoid csh like the plague because it has some "this should work
> but doesn't" inconsistencies (which I can't recall at the moment but it
> was an annoying bug).
> 
> I've heard a lot of folks say they prefer shell scripts because it takes
> fewer lines of code than Perl. This is only true of short scripts.
> 
> Personally I'm a big fan of Perl (and Python), and if I'm in a hurry
> I'll mix in `bash` readpipes within Perl. This isn't as fast to execute
> as native Perl -- and it can be less secure than straight Perl - but
> when then those concerns don't apply this is a nice way to leverage both
> languages, and get the job done.
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Chambers" <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
> To: <discuss at Blu.Org>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 12:19 PM
> Subject: Re: csh vs tcsh
> 
> 
> > 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.
> >
> >
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> 
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