Re: whatis

[noel@es.su.oz.au]

    From:	Scott Schwartz <schwartz@groucho.cs.psu.edu>
    Date:	Sat, 17 Oct 1992 10:21:58 +1000
    To:	Donn Cave <donn@u.washington.edu>
    cc:	es@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu
    Subject: Re: whatis 
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    | While I'm complaining:
    | I miss the rc "whatis", that dumps out variables with needed quotes.

    Whatis does too much work, since it also tells you about executables
    found with path lookup.  If whatis makes it into es, it really needs to
    have options to select what kind of thing to talk about!  In scheme,
    "read" and "write" deal in standard external representations, while
    "display" works like echo.

i think `whatis' should be part of es with at lease the functionality
of `whatis' in the v8 bourne shell (a superset of which is provided by
`whatis' in rc).

don't forget why rob pike added `whatis' to the bourne shell in the
first place - to get ouput from the shell that could be re-read _by_
the shell. this was done in the knowledge that that shell was going to
be used in a windowing environment, viz. `mux', where this feature
proved extremely useful; the same arguments apply for X11.