MSH (shell)

[bearophileHUGS@lycos.com]

This can be of little interest of some people here, but I think it can
be interesting enough to justify a post.

An article on the Microsoft Command Shell:

http://arstechnica.com/guides/other/msh.ars

(Its syntax is rather Python-like, but Py syntax seems better to me,
even taking into account that their purposes are a little different).

Other info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSH_(shell)

Something vaguely similar made with Python:

http://geophile.com/osh/index.html

Bye,
bearophile

[Michael]

Re: MSH (shell)

bearophileHUGS@ lycos.com wrote:
[color=blue]
> This can be of little interest of some people here, but I think it can
> be interesting enough to justify a post.
>
> An article on the Microsoft Command Shell:
> http://arstechnica.com/guides/other/msh.ars
> (Its syntax is rather Python-like, but Py syntax seems better to me,
> even taking into account that their purposes are a little different).
>
> Other info:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSH_(shell)
>
> Something vaguely similar made with Python:
> http://geophile.com/osh/index.html[/color]

Kamaelia's Axon Shell[*] is also very similar. An Axon scheduler runs as a
background thread to an IPython interpretor, allowing you to "launch"
Kamaelia components interactively, including both pipelines and Graphlines
of components.
[*] http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/AxonShell.html

But then Kamaelia IS designed as a pipeline/graphline (1d,2d,n-d) system
from the ground up, so having a shell for it was a logical step :-) ...

I suppose the difference between python and MSH is you don't need a separate
language, maybe a module or three, but you don't need to modify the
language :)



Michael.

[Paddy]

Re: MSH (shell)

Thanks, I'm enjoying reading the article.
So far I noticed how their select functionality is similar to our
comprehensions, but can also take a statement block. ( no wars please
;-).

I liked the tabular output format for lists of similar items, with the
automatic headings being displayed, e.g:
msh> get-childitem | select name, extension, {
if ($_.LastWriteTi me.year -lt 2004) { "old file" }
else { "new file" }
}

Name Extension if
($_.LastWriteTi me.year...
---- ---------
-------------------------
examples.txt .txt new file
output1.html .html old file
output2.html .html old file
somefile.doc .doc new file


I tend to avoid xml but their xml example below was succinct and
relatively painless. Do python libraries allow a similarly readable
version of their:

msh> $x = [xml]"<zoo><anim al
kind='monkey'>< name>Albert</name></animal></zoo>"
msh> $x.zoo.animal

kind name
---- ----
monkey Albert

Their "Extract the title and author elements from every item in the
rss.channel tag" example is also impressive.

Looks like an innovative new shell.

- Paddy.