Re: You said the J word

[Bruce Perens <bruce@pixar.com>]

I can see you've thought this through very well.

I would prefer to have some more control over wait(). Where
$cmd is invoked, its pid should be recorded and passed to an operator
that would do an explicit wait on a list of process-ids. In this manner,
the difference between foreground and background processes could be
reduced to signal handling and wait processing that would be
user-modifyable.

Yes, history should be handled in that loop.
When the user just hits return, the user-written read-eval loop should 
have a chance to regain control and decide what to do rather than simply
having %parse re-prompt. I don't know what anyone would do with this, I
just think it might be useful.

Regarding the posibility of job control - I wouldn't try to implement it
the way it is in BSD. Something using PTYs would be easier, and could
be made to work close to the BSD semantics. The result would be sort of
a cross between the ATT shell-levels and CSH job control.