[IronPython] Re: MSH vs IronPython

[Larry O'Brien]

>>What capabilities does MSH have that couldn't be added to Python (or some 
>>other extensible scriptable language) by building an appropriate library?

I suspect that the lion's share of work in MSH has not been the scripting
syntax but has had to do with the infrastructure for creating a "pipes and
filters" shell architecture that passes around .NET objects. 

I agree that there are aspects of the MSH syntax that seem gratuitously
contrarian -- after 15 years of training the developer community to think
"noun.verb()" they adopt "verb-noun". But it's not really the developers to
whom they're trying to give a tool, it's the administrators (there's
overlap, but not nearly complete) and perhaps in some usability study
"verb-noun" has been shown... I dunno', seems gratuitous to me. 

But I think it would be a mistake to assume that a Python interactive prompt
would _necessarily_ be more productive and easier to understand by the
majority of users. In the best of all possible worlds, I would love to have
a .profile that essentially provided a Python console as _my_ interactive
prompt but which would still support push-location pop-location. And Joe
Administrator can have a "pure" MSH shell and Jane Unix could have a
bash-like shell. 

I don't know if MS has made any statements about whether that kind of
customization will be possible within MSH. 

Cheers,
Larry