[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Adam Thornton]

> On Dec 30, 2022, at 1:02 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> 
> 
> Is there are reason to hang on to the Bourne shell?  Maybe shell scripts?
> Does it perform better than ksh or bash?

POSIX sh seems like a good lowest-common-denominator shell to write for (sorry, SunOS and xpg4).

> 
> Don't get me wrong, I much prefer the sh syntax over csh syntax, but 
> I'd never go back to the Bourne shell as my login shell.  Way too much
> useful stuff in ksh/bash.

I mean I would assume the reason is that bash takes a whole lot more memory and CPU to do its very convenient magic.  That's an issue if you're trying to run on a PDP-11 and only have 16 bits of address space, but in 64-bit-world, where you almost certainly have at least half a gigabyte of core storage available, and your processor clock is almost certainly in at least the high hundreds of MHz...yeah.

Although (because my daily driver is a Mac) I've finally taken the zsh plunge.  I feel a little dirty, but oh-my-zsh certainly has its attractions.

Adam