[mercury-users] This Year's Mercury Entry for the ICF 2001 Contest

[Michael Day]

> Perhaps the starting point should be to work through POSIX.2 (Commands
> and Utilities) and try to characterise the behaviour of as many commands
> and utilities as possible in some fashion so that something rather like
> type checking could be used.  Then design the scripting language in the
> light of the lessons learned by doing this.

Where does one get hold of the POSIX specifications?

Unix commands seem to be typed in that they either:

	- generate a stream (ls)
	- filter a stream (cat, sed, xargs, sort, uniq...)
	- consume a stream (can't think of any)
	- just do stuff with side effects (cp, rm)

They can all succeed or fail, but are not semidet in that they can fail
halfway and don't backtrack to clean up whatever mess they've made. (In
the case of the commands with side effects).

Can they be given stronger types than that? Could you impose some kind of
structure on the ascii streams?

Michael

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