Re: free carets

[haahr@mv.us.adobe.com (Paul Haahr)]

> >Ok, ok, just thinking aloud. I don't use free carets much myself, but I have
> >a feeling that es won't be taken up by many people unless it offers them.

> I think the number of people who would avoid es because of this is paltry
> compared to the number of people who aren't using it because it doesn't
> have job control.  That shouldn't be a concern.

i think that most people don't have a clue as to what free carets are.
they don't have to.  they use shells that don't need them.

rc added free carets as a formal mechanism meant to replace one of the
advantageous properties of rescanning input in sh or csh.  es picked
them up because its input model is (mostly) the same as rc's.

my concern is not that people won't use es because it has or doesn't have
free carets.  my concern is that the removal of free carets would make es
much less convenient for those of us who actually use it.

as i said earlier, i want this discussion to stop for now.  if you really
think free carets should be purged, run es without them for a week as your
interactive shell and tell me.

for the record, i did build an es without free carets and installed it.
as soon as i forgot that it didn't have free carets, i botched a command.
i happened to write a ``$var/file'' expression and forgot the caret.  i
deleted that hacked version right away.

i don't think that free carets cause that much confusion in the language.
we've all talked for years about how simple rc's syntax is;  free carets
are part of that, Tom Duff's reservations accepted.

i think John's suggestion of removing free careting was perfectly reasonable,
and i'm glad he raised the issue because it was certainly worth considering.
i thought about it seriously, and decided i don't like the change.  we can
debate this further, but until i hear from people with experience in using
the shell without free carets, i won't be moved one iota.

paul