[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 12:00:20PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > > If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
> 
> They were all broken.  Badly.  If your scripts worked, you got lucky at
> Russian Roulette.  No greater claim to robustness can be made.
> 
> POSIX shell conformance still proves challenging for vendors, but is an
> immense improvement over the status quo ante.

You are talking to a dude with 40+ years of Unix experience, supporting
commercial products most of that time.  I didn't get "lucky at Russian
Roulette", I wrote scripts that were portable.  I have 40 year old scripts
that _still_ work and they work on virtually every Unix ever built.
How do I know?  I was a contractor for my first job, I got plopped down
in front of every random unix you could imagine and each time I polished
off the warts.

I spent decades supporting my own products on every flavor of Unix and
processors from Arm to System/360.  Oh, and Windows XP and on and MacOS.

My scripts worked with /bin/sh being whatever it was.

It's interesting to me that other old timers, like Clem, are saying
exactly the same thing as I am.  Are we all wrong?