Re: Not job control in ES, but job control implemented in an ES script

[Paul Haahr <haahr@mv.us.adobe.com>]

> What I was proposing was to make it possible for an ES user
> to write a job-control system as an ES script.

maybe it could be done external to es, but you're going to need some  
access to system calls that is not provided now.  maybe i'm too deep  
into implementation right now, but i don't think it's possible.  if you  
(or anyone else) can do it, great.

as to the religious issue of job control:  i don't use it, i don't like  
it, i don't understand how it fully works, and i don't want to make  
pervasive changes to es to support it.  if someone comes to me and  
Byron and says, ``i need these two extra primitives and this one extra  
line of conditionally compiled code in signal.c and i'll then be able  
to write full csh-style job control in es,'' we'd probably put it in,  
albeit with some serious grumbling.  (i don't think it will happen,  
though.  it just don't look that easy to me.)

> I don't even think ES should provide globbing. It should call
> on an external program to do that.

the reason that there's no %glob to be replaced is that the quoting  
flags are not visible as es data structures.  maybe that's a mistake,  
but i do let performance concerns matter some of the time.  as time  
goes on, globbing may move out of the shell.  (since that's how it was  
done in days of yore, i think we've observed another cycle of  
reincarnation.)