Discussion
For no particularly good reason I'm currently thinking about how I'd define "terminal", "command line", and "shell" in a Unix context¹ (I think you can draw a difference between the last two, although maybe people don't in practice). It's slightly tricky but I've already covered some of the ground before in my techblog writing.
(If you want a challenge, explain to yourself why the Python REPL is not a shell.)
¹ sparked by a Fedi conversation on this I saw fly past but can't find now.
@cks
terminal - tty, a bidirectional text device supporting tty_ioctl, used by a user to interact with a program; sometimes also a program or physical contraption through which a user interfaces with a tty
command line - an argv, an array of null-terminated bytestrings passed to a program on startup, through which a user or another program can pass arguments
1/
shell - a program (usually controlled through a tty) whose primary purpose is to allow a user to spawn other programs and pass arguments to them (usually through command line), and combine those programs together (eg. through pipes)
@cks
A Python REPL can be a shell after you from subprocess import *, but it'd be a very inconveneint shell, as typing out all the arguments to subprocess.run can be quite tedious
I'd argue that it isn't a shell even then because a shell's default response to a command it doesn't implement is to treat it as an external program.
It would be trivial to *write* a shell in Python tho that's mostly just a REPL but also does a tokenize+run on commands.
(Of course, Python isn't a great language for this because the syntax limits you to what you can do one one line. Ruby or Perl or $LISP would be better choices.)
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