bishc

More generally, SSA means implicit use/def information. Use/def information and traversal are critical components of many static analyses and transformations: having the IR in SSA form greatly simplifies reasoning about and implementing these analyses and transformations.

In my experience, many people will miss the significance of this, or will simply fail to grasp how this is implementing a programming language at all. After all, you're taking advantage of the host language for every single aspect of the new language, even tokenizing/parsing.

More interesting for beginners (in my opinion) are examples implementing a simple tokenizer, parser, and compiler to another source language. This seems to be what closes the gap between programming languages as mystical constructs and programming languages as programs themselves.

This point of view does tend to displease the traditional SICP crowd though :-).

There is a section of the readme titled "Why" :-).

Interesting notion! I personally am not a fan of whitespace sensitivity, but I understand why many people are. For me, after spending years writing code with curly braces and semicolons, they are effectively invisible (and thus do not seem to waste my "human bandwidth").

That being said, the choice to include those syntax features in bish was made entirely to make writing a parser easier, not for any deep philosophical reason.

That's what I was going for. Not a replacement for bash the shell, but a language that provides a bit more comfort for programmers while retaining the ability to run on any system your scripts did previously.

(OP here). You're right: for simple tasks like listing files or changing directories, you probably don't need bish. I should come up with some better examples where bish wins in readability.