A Description of Scsh

scsh.net

a description of scsh

Scsh as a scripting language

Scsh has a high-level process notation for doing shell-script like tasks: running programs, establishing pipelines and I/O redirection. For example, the shell pipeline

gunzip < paper.tex.gz | detex | spell | lpr -Ppulp &

would be written in scsh as

(& (| (gunzip) (detex) (spell) (lpr -Ppulp)) ; background a pipeline 
    (< paper.tex.gz))                         ; with this redirection

Scsh embeds this process notation within a full Scheme implementation. The process notation is realised as a set of macro definitions, and is carefully designed to allow full integration with standard Scheme code. Scsh isn't Scheme-like; it is Scheme. At the scripting level, scsh also has an Awk design, also implemented as a macro that can be embedded inside general Scheme code.

Scsh as a systems-programming language

Scsh additionally provides the low-level access to the operating system normally associated with C. With the exception of signal handlers, the current release provids full access to Posix, plus important non-Posix extensions, such as complete sockets support. “Complete Posix” means: fork, exec & wait, sockets, full read, write, open & close, seek & tell, complete file-system access, including stat, chmod/chgrp/chown, symlink, FIFO & directory access, tty & pty support, file locking, pipes, select, file-name pattern-matching, time & date, environment variables, and more. In brief, you can now write Unix systems programs in Scheme instead of C. For example, we have implemented an extensible HTTP server at MIT entirely in scsh. As important as full access to the OS is the manner in which it is provided. Scsh integrates the OS support into Scheme in a manner which respects the general structure of the language. The details of the design are discussed in a joint MIT Lab for Computer Science/University of Hong Kong technical report, “A Scheme shell,” also to appear in a revised format in the Journal of Lisp and Symbolic Computation. This paper is also available by ftp.

Scsh is a portable programming environment

Scsh is designed for portability. It is implemented on top of Scheme 48, a byte-code-interpreter Scheme implementation. The Scheme 48 virtual machine can be compiled on any system with a C compiler; the rest of Scheme 48 is machine-independent across 32-bit processors. Scsh's OS interface is also quite portable, providing a consistent interface across different Unix platforms. We currently have scsh implementations for DEC Ultrix, GNU Hurd, HP-UX, IBM AIX Linux, NetBSD/i386, NeXTSTEP, SGI IRIX, Solaris, and SunOS. Scsh code should run without change across these systems. Porting to new platforms is usually not difficult.