Lessons from a clisp shell

[panesofglass]

Posting this for posterity: I think we should look at implementing a number of the features allowed in this article an the parent post.

[OnorioCatenacci]

Hi Ryan,

Are you envisioning implementing cp (copy), rm (delete) etc. in finnikin? Just trying to understand what we're talking about :-)

[panesofglass]

Not necessarily, though that's an idea. I was more thinking of creating a number of combinators that would allow easy extension, especially if this runs more or less like a glorified fsi session. Providing some basic functionality would certainly encourage usage as a standard shell, though.

[OnorioCatenacci]

Hi Ryan,

I'm not sure if I've quite understood what you're saying about combinators but I think the FileOperation -> Touch -> SetFilesToReadWrite is sort of what I understand combinators to be about. Please let me know what you think when you get the time.

Onorio

[panesofglass]

By combinators I simply mean small, general purpose functions that can be composed or combined to form new operations. These would work much like the *nix command line functions with the | operator, or |> in F#. Essentially, rather than having to call File.Xyz(x, y, z), we provide functions like xyzFile x y z that can be run, partially applied, or chained to make them easier to use.

[OnorioCatenacci]

Ok, that's what I thought you meant. Yes, I agree; building a library of a lot of little combinators would be a good approach.