[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[arnold at skeeve.com]

I wrote:

> I did do stuff with the shell back in the 80s:

I also recall that there was some USENET discussion in which
Rob Pike described how the 8th edition shell changed the search
order to have functions come before non-special built-ins, with
the addition of "builtin" and "whatis" commands.

Rob was kind enough to send me the sh.1 man page from the 8th edition
(which I still have somewhere), and I made this change in the S5r2
shell. I don't know if I posted diffs or not.

In any case, as part of implementing whatis, I wrote a pretty printer
for shell functions. (Getting 'elif' right needed some extra code.) I
offered it to Rob, who politely declined, indicating that he had his own.

Ah, those were the days... :-)

Arnold