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interactivity with the glory shell


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: interactivity with the glory shell
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 03:59:27 -0500 (CDT)

On 28-Aug-1998, Daniel Heiserer <address@hidden> wrote:

| 1) As I cannot imagine, hwy anybody should use the "!" as the 1st
| character in a string to be evalutaed, either on the commandline/script
| nor with the eval("!foo") octave could use it as the shell escape and
| get more matlab compability. If the "!" is not the 1st character use it
| as the negation character.

I can imagine that someone would type something like `! x' at the
command line to see what the result would be.  It would be confusing
if that suddenly tried to execute the shell command `x' instead of
negating the value in the variable x.

| 2) It would be nice to get the answer of the shell using the ``
| (backquotes). This is much shorter than the system command.

Perhaps.  At least the backquotes are not currently used for anything
else, so it seems much more possible to implement without breaking
anything.

| I know that the system command of octave has the power to do all that
| stuff. But why not adding a few more nice features, even if the provide
| much more matlab-script functionlaity.

Lack of time?  It seems that the capability is already there.
Wouldn't it make more sense to work to implement things that Octave
cannot do, rather than spend time working on adding syntactic sugar
(particularly when it would introduce some ambiguity)?

My priorities could probably be influenced by sufficient funding,
however.  :-)  Otherwise, perhaps someone else has the time and interest
to implement these features (the first *must* be optional, and not
turned on by default. If the changes are clean and relative to the
2.1.x sources, I'll consider merging them in.

Thanks,

jwe



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