Month: May 2019

smoosh v0.1

Programming Languages, SoftwareLeave a comment

I’ve been building an executable formalization of the POSIX shell semantics, which I’ve been calling smoosh (the Symbolic, Mechanized, Observable, Operational SHell).

I’m pleased to announce an important early milestone: smoosh passes the POSIX test suite (modulo locales, which smoosh doesn’t currently support). I’ve accordingly tagged this ‘morally correct’ verison as smoosh v0.1. You can play around with the latest version via the shtepper, a web-based frontend to a symbolic stepper. I think the shtepper will be particularly useful for those trying to learn the shell or to debug shell scripts.

There’s still plenty to do, of course: there are bugs to fix, quirks to normalize, features to implement, and tests to run. But please: play around with the smoosh shell and the shtepper, file bug reports, and submit patches!

OBT on hiatus

BlogLeave a comment

The recent organizers of the Off the Beaten Track (OBT) workshop (Luke Church, Bob Atkey, Lindsey Kuper, Swarat Chaudhuri, Ranjit Jhala, Shriram Krishnamurthi, David Walker, and me) have decided not to hold OBT at POPL 2020.

OBT served a particular purpose: a venue for testing out new, weird ideas at a familiar setting with familiar faces. It was, as Lindsey Kuper explains, very successful! We all felt that there are now many venues for initial attempts with weird ideas; with that need met elsewhere, OBT feels less important.

OBT may not be gone forever. We’ll reconsider next year. If you have a strong opinion on the subject, please let me know!