[aclug-L] david korn interview

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anyone interested in shell programming should take a look at
Slashdot's interview with David Korn:

  http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/06/2030205.shtml

In particular, Korn provides a list of features added to ksh93
over ksh88:

>  1. Associative arrays - ksh88 already supports indexed arrays. 
>  2. Floating point arithmetic + math library functions. 
>  3. Arithmetic for command similar to C and awk. 
>  4. Complete ANSI C printf formatting with extensions. 
>  5. Run time linking of libraries and builtins. 
>  6. A number of additional substring operations such as offset
>     length. 
>  7. Full extended regular expression matching capabilities 
>  8. Compound variables which can be used to represent data
>     aggregates. 
>  9. Name references for passing aggregate variables by name. 
> 10. Active variables. Users can trap variable assignment
>     and references by associating intercept functions of
>     the form name.get and name.set. 
> 11. Ability to make socket connections to servers by name. 
> 12. read with timeouts. 
> 13. Conformance to POSIX 1003.2. 
> 14. Command completion and variable completion, ksh93 only had
>     file name completion. 
> 15. A key binding mechanism that allows users to bind
>     keys to new editing functions.

ksh93 source code and binary packages can be found at:

  http://www.research.att.com/sw/download/

I did manage to install the Linux binaries for ast-open. It
includes many programs you already have (e.g., chown, grep,
head, mkdir), so the binary install has to go into its own
directory world. To use this, you have to set a bunch of
environment variables (bin/package/environment use DIR).
There are man pages on some things, not others. Doesn't
look ready for prime time, but not without interest.

-- 
/*
 *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.ocston.org/~thull/
 */

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