Re: [GSoC] Bourne-shell compiler front-end for Guile

[Efraim Flashner]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2016 23:27:25 +0100
address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> Hi Efraim,
> 
> Thanks for your proposal!
> 
> This project can be pretty fun, I think, and quite rewarding if it
> indeed allows us to get rid of a bunch of bootstrap binaries.
> 
> As I see it, the project covers mostly two areas:
> 
>   1. Lexing & parsing.  This compiler front-end will need a real parser
>      for the Bourne shell syntax, notably semicolon-separated command
>      sequences, pipes, brace-delimited blocks, functions, variables, and
>      ‘test’ and ‘[’.
> 
>      The available tools could be SILex + (system base lalr) (the latter
>      is part of Guile, the former is maintained separately; a copy can
>      be found in Guile-RPC for instance.)
> 
>   2. Run-time support: redirections, pipes, background execution, C-c
>      (SIGINT) and C-z (SIGTSTP), globbing, and so on.
> 
>      Guile provides just the basic here, and a little more with (ice-9
>      popen).  Scsh and its Guile port(s) provide a lot of that, so it
>      might be a good idea to see what can be stolen from these.
> 
> It may be that some of your CS classes cover some of this ground (a
> fairly common programming project here at university is to implement a
> small shell precisely because it covers several areas.)
> 
> How does that sound?
> 
> Perhaps one way to get started would be by looking at the available
> tools for #1, and experimenting with hacks for #2, possibly borrowing
> code from Scsh.
> 
> Thoughts?

Sounds like lots of fun, I'm really looking forward to it. And it sounds like
I'll need to dive deeper into bash to see what I get to implement

> 
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.
> 
> PS: Would be nice to have a second mentor on this, either officially or
>     unofficially (if you don’t want to have a to be known to Google…).
>     Any takers?  :-)



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