Revision [63]
This is an old revision of BasicSyntax made by DavidLee on 2008-04-20 09:06:11.
Basic Syntax
xmlsh is derived from a similar syntax as the unix shells (see Philosophy). If you are familiar with any of these shell languages (sh,bash,ksh,zsh) you should be right at home. An attempt was made to stay very close to the sh syntax where reasonable, but not all subtlies or features of the unix shells are implemented. In order to accomidate native XML types and pipelines some deviations and extensions were necessary. Lastly, as an implementation issue, xmlsh is implemented in java using the javacc compiler for parsing. This made support for some of the syntax and features of the C based shells difficult or impossible. Future work may try to tighten up these issues.
Invocation
xmlsh can run in 2 modes, interactive and batch. In interactive mode, a prompt ("$ ") is displayed and in batch mode there is no prompt. Otherwise they are identical. Running xmlsh with no arguments starts an interactive shell. Running with an argument runs in batch mode and invokes the given script.
