I'll comment on 2 points: - bash installation - many tools vs. few limited tools
1. AFAICT, the bash installation issue is rather moot. First of all, for several (many?) years, bash (and certainly sh, probably for even longer) has been installed on t2 and tx. Secondly, if Kimchi or any other faculty member in the department, or even a large group of students, would have asked for it, I don't think the computer center would have objected to installing sh or bash even earlier. It's just a shell after all, pretty harmless. 2. What Orr is arguing is valid, IMO, when teaching compiled programming languages. For interpreted languages, I'm not sure I agree, and for shell scripts I definitely disagree. The idea of shell scripting is 'sewing together' the numerous tools available on a system. When teaching people to use shell scripts, it is not your intention to make them learn to squeeze code/mem usage/etc., but rather to get things done in a simple manner on typical (UNIXish) machines without resorting to writing complex C or C++ programs (which is in theory the only other kind of programming the students are capable of when taking MATAM). Now, I agree that telling them to employ perl or awk is overkill, since they're not supposed to be learning yet another scripting language. But standard binaries with reasonably rudimentary syntax should certainly be in their toolbox. In this respect, teaching shell scripting is also the teaching of use of nice UNIX tools. I don't accept the "find isn't available on Windows", since MATAM is UNIX-focused even regardless of shell scripting, plus I'm guessing there's probably some find-like binary in Windows, just like C:\Windows\System32\find.exe is a sort-of-a-grep. _______________________________________________ Haifux mailing list Haifux@haifux.org http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haifux