Re: shells The Design of Design

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:

According to Thomas Koenig  <tkoenig@netcologne.de>:

I was not around, but my impression is that by time of creation of UNIX
it was a common understanding. For example, DEC supplied RSX-11 with
DCL at about the same time [as UNIX got Thompson shell) and I never
heard that anybody considered it novel.

>
The Thompson shell was still restricted to GOTO (as was the RSX-11
shell).

>
You're probably thinking of the Mashey shell.

Disclaimer: I never worked on those old systems, my first UNIX
experience was with HP-UX in the late 1980s (where I accidentally
landed in vi and could not get out, but that's another story).

One of the first usenix
tapes has patches I wrote in about 1976 to add simple variables with
single character names to that shell.  It was an improvement, but the
Bourne shell was way better.

https://grosskurth.ca/bib/1976/mashey-command.pdf (written by Mashey)
credits the original shell to Thompson, so I believe we are talking
about the same shell, just with different names.

Re when this stuff was invented, I did some work on CP/67 when I was
in high school in about 1970 and I recall that even then people
routinely ran files of CMS commands. Don't remember whether there were
variables and control flow or that came later with REXX.

Hmmm... I looked at

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/370/VM/370/Release_1/GX20-1926-1_VM_370_Quick_Guide_For_Users__Rel_1_Apr73.pdf

and found a reference to $LOOP and a reference to "tokens" (which I
suppose are variables), so that definitely predated the UNIX shells.