Re: feeping creatures, again

[John (Most modern computers would break if you stood on them) Mackin <john@ civil.su.oz.au>]

    I'm going to go to Hell for that suggestion, aren't I?

You sure are, Alan.  Directly and with extreme prejudice. :)

Take out lambda and you're taking the "e" out of "es".  (I suppose
"s" would be an OK name for the resulting shell...)  The point is
that passing code fragments around is the pervasive model for es
programming.  It's the lambda _and_ the hooks that make es "e".
Paul and Byron made a great job of the design.

I don't have any suggestions as to what to cut right now.  I'll see if
I can come up with some.

I'd like to add my voice in praise of Harald's excellent idea.
Anyone who advocates that lists in a shell should have deep
structure should actually TRY programming a shell with such
lists.  I have in mind "zsh", not the `popular' kitchen-sink
shell of the same name (I have no idea what it has), but rather
the ZMailer semi-k?sh-compatible internal configuration
implementation shell language.  That has lists with deep
structure as in Lisp, and by DAMN are they hard to work with
in the context of shell programming!  (I speak as a Scheme fan, btw.)

And at the risk of flogging a dead horse, I didn't speak to this
issue when it was raised, but really, there's no need to digestify
either the rc or es lists.  Digests are a big pain in most cases,
and anyone who thinks that these are high-traffic lists should
try joining a high-traffic list.  Say, WORDS-L.  (Which I am not
on, but once was for a few days...)

[By the way, why do people keep mailing list articles to es-owner?
I am getting them with all these "Resent-" headers.  I presume that
had to be done by hand.]

OK,
John.