morning everybody!

one of the first posts I read when I came to the monastery was perl6: Switch, another case (pun intended) for unscoped eval, mostly because the original title had the word "indented" instead of "intended" (see here) and I was curious whether it was a relatively clever pun, or a typo (after the fact, if it's a pun I don't get it). Now, I don't claim to understand the code that was posted, but the thread, and some of the links it sent me to, piqued my interest. It seems StefP thinks perl would be an ideal shell language, except that its missing a few things (read the last link above for his RFC on a scopeless eval). Apparently, he's been thinking about this for a while.

I have to say, I'd love to see this happen and believe that a perl shell would be an incredible tool for the *nix community. But the most important question remains unanswered:

What would we call it?

there are some folk at sourceforge who have been working on an implementation of this idea, calling it "psh". (the youngest file in their cvs tree is 7 months old, so I don't know how much they're actually working on the project. It's possible they're waiting for perl6). psh? we can do better than that. ^_-

my favorite idea so far is "posh"- the "Perl Only SHell", or perhaps "Perl Optimized SHell". I mean, it's posh-- all the cool kids will be using it. Dictionary.com offers this definition: "Smart and Fashionable". Now come on, wouldn't you like that to read "Smart and Fashionable. See also 'Perl Only SHell'"?

Still, this acronym is sort of vanilla-- it doesn't involve any recursion or other such neatness, and doesn't call upon the forces of GNU. Any monks out there got any ideas on what to call this beauty once smarter folk than I bring her to the light of day?

wandering the halls,
--au

Thanks to tye for his new super search, which made pulling this post together a breeze