A Scheme Shell

# 14 Acknowledgements

John Ellis' 1980 SIGPLAN Notices paper [Ellis] got me thinking about this entire area. Some of the design for the system calls was modeled after Richard Stallman's emacs [emacs], Project MAC's MIT Scheme [MIT Scheme], and COMMON LISP [CLtL2]. Tom Duff's Unix shell, rc, was also inspirational; his is the only elegant Unix shell I've seen [rc]. Flames with Bennet Yee and Scott Draves drove me to design scsh in the first place; polite discussions with John Ellis and Scott Nettles subsequently improved it. Douglas Orr was my private Unix kernel consultant. Richard Kelsey and Jonathan Rees provided me with twenty-four hour turnaround time on requested modifications to Scheme 48, and spent a great deal of time explaining the internals of the implementation to me. Their elegant Scheme implementation was a superb platform for development. The design and the major portion of the implementation of scsh were completed while I was visiting on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong in 1992. It was very pleasant to work in such a congenial atmosphere. Doug Kwan was a cooperative sounding-board during the design phase. Hsu Suchu has patiently waited quite a while for this document to be finished. Members of the MIT LCS and AI Lab community encouraged me to polish the research prototype version of the shell into something releasable to the net. Henry Minsky and Ian Horswill did a lot of the encouraging; my students Dave Albertz and Brian Carlstrom did a lot of the polishing.

Finally, the unix-haters list helped a great deal to maintain my perspective.