A shell-like model for general purpose programming
Article No.: 10, Pages 1 - 7
Abstract
Shell scripting languages such as bash are designed to integrate with an OS, which mainly involves managing processes with implicit input and output streams. They also attempt to do this in a compact way that could be reasonably typed on a command-line interface.
However, existing shell languages are not sufficient to serve as general-purpose languages---values are not observable except in raw streams of bytes, and they lack modern language features such as lexical scope and higher-order functions.
By way of a new programming language, Magritte, we propose a general-purpose programming language with semantics similar to bash. In this paper, we discuss the early design of such a system, in which the primary unit of composition, like bash, is processes with input and output channels, which can be read from or written to at any time, and which can be chained together via a pipe operator. We also explore concurrency semantics for such a language.
References
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Tom Duff. 1990. RC---a Shell for Plan 9 and UNIX. In UNIX Vol. II, A. G. Hume and M. D. McIlroy (Eds.). W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 283--296.
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Noah Paul Evans and Eric Van Hensbergen. 2009. Brief Announcement: PUSH, a DISC Shell. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 306--307.
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Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. 2018. The Go Programming Language. Retrieved Dec 2018 from http://golang.org/.
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Paul Haahr and Byron Rakitzis. 1993. Es: A shell with higher-order functions. In Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1993 Conference Proceedings on USENIX Winter 1993 Conference Proceedings (USENIX'93). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 53--62.
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Richard Hickey. 2008. The Clojure Programming Language. In Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on Dynamic Languages. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
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Hiroaki Inoue, Tomoyuki Aotani, and Atsushi Igarashi. 2018. ContextWorkflow: A Monadic DSL for Compensable and Interruptible Executions. In 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2018) (Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)), Todd Millstein (Ed.), Vol. 109. Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, Dagstuhl, Germany, 2:1--2:33.
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Linux man-pages Project. 2018. pipe(7) Linux User's Manual (4.16 ed.). The Linux Foundation, https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
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Microsoft. 2018. PowerShell Documentation. Retrieved Dec 2018 from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/.
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John K. Ousterhout. 1989. Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language. Technical Report. Berkeley, CA, USA.
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Matt Russell. 2018. Mash: An object shell for UNIX. Retrieved Dec 2018 from http://mash-shell.org/.
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Index Terms
- A shell-like model for general purpose programming
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Published: 01 April 2019
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Programming '19
Programming '19: Companion of the 3rd International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming
April 1 - 4, 2019
Genova, Italy
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