Re: My "Stop Using (and Teaching) C-Shell and Tcsh" Page

On 10/7/07, Nadav Har'El <nyh-TS7m/[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> What always baffles me is why people learn or teach csh at all. With all
> its
> downsides, bugs and problems (whether there are 5, 10 or 50 of those),
> what
> exactly are its positive sides?


It was 12 years ago when I learned csh, but from what I remember the "killer
feature" was the c-like properties of csh, the ability to program in a way
that is almost, but not entirely unlike c.

I have to admit that as my first shell (I knew nothing of Unix when I came
to the Technion and we did study csh) it looked half decent, and easy to
learn if you know c. Then again, as I learned to realize that my nice
scripts wouldn't really run anywhere, the charm kinda went away.

When I worked in the Technion's computer center and had to deal with the
users whining about incompatible csh/tcsh versions across the different
platforms, I learned to dislike it. When that physics professor was told he
would have to rewrite his rather elaborate multi-kilobyte tcsh script in
another language (sh was suggested) for it to run on a particular parallel
computer because the compiler there wouldn't compile tcsh... fun times.

Today I write even the simplest scripts in Python, and use bash as my shell.

Take care,

-- Arik