Is ksh93 still alive?
As I mentioned in my previous article I’m looking for a new shell since I’ve given up on the Fish project. For many years I used ksh88 then ksh93. After that I switched to zsh because it looked like ksh was a dead project. But two years ago the AT&T Software Technology (“AST”) toolkit was moved to Github and open sourced. In the past year an individual has committed some changes to the ksh source code. If it’s once again being improved it might be worth a look.
So in addition to elvish I think I’ll take another look at ksh. The Korn shell lacks many of the features people have come to expect from newer shells. Most notably a good command completion subsystem. But the ksh source code is pretty clean. It has a consistent style and good interfaces. There are things about its style I don’t like such as the use of single statement blocks that are not enclosed in braces since that pattern makes it too easy to introduce a bug and makes it harder to visually parse the code. Here’s an example from the getopts.c module:
if(r<0)
r = 0;
Still, at least the code is consistent in employing that pattern. It also omits whitespace around binary operators like minus and commas that separate parameters. At least most of time. Something I think hurts readability especially since it doesn’t do so 100% of the time. I’d probably want to run the code through clang-format and otherwise manually fix the remaining style inconsistencies before contributing more substantive changes. Much like I did for fish. The question is whether the people with commit privileges would accept such changes. And whether they would be open to the idea of implementing some of ideas from newer shells like fish.