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Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

but rc doesn't have built in regex and doesn't have hash tables. My guess is that bash is trying to be a full scripting language these days, sort of like perl.

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>but rc doesn't have built in regex and doesn't have hash tables

That's an advantage; Plan 9 provides awk for those use cases. There is a clear separation, and a simple yet powerful language for communication (pipes, file descriptors, and files).

>bash is trying to be a full scripting language these days

Arguably Bash over-did somewhere around the time they added support for TCP connections

  exec {FD}<>/dev/tcp/news.ycombinator.com/80; echo GET / >&$FD; cat <&$FD

Not sure if arguing for plan9 simplicity by pointing out bashisms designed to emulate how one might use sockets on plan9/rc is the best strategy.

The difference being that such functionality arose from the fundamentals of how plan9 worked, whereas bash hacked in a simulacrum.

Actually, that's something that seems inspired by Plan 9 with its /net/tcp/xxx files. Bash just tries to make it cross platform so it cannot rely on the host OS like rc does.

There were already netcat and similar tools that worked together with bash to provide this functionality.

Maybe there was a clear separation 30 years ago, but there no longer is. The shortcut for the posts below is that you can write a Lisp in all of shell, awk, and make (and sed too) [1]

I won't get to this in Oil (without help) but I still think it's valid. The languages have so much overlap that they should just be combined. Of course that's what Perl was (leaving out Make), but Raku and Python 3 seem to have left a hole in that design space.

Shell, Awk, and Make Should Be Combined http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/13.html

Example Code in Shell, Awk, and Make http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/14.html

[1] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/tree/master/impls

Because rc is a shell to run commands, hence the name rc, run command. For the tasks you mentioned you would use a program or language such as awk to handle those cases.

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