12. Future work

Support for `csh'-style job control is currently being worked on. It (like other parts of Q) uses code from `bash', the GNU shell, written primarily by Brain Fox.

Make Q a practical (robust) default shell.

Investigate use of multiple threads or co-routines.

Add Garbage collection. (The Q implementation does not collect garbage, though it has been designed under the assumption that a garbage collector will be available. I have waited for g++ version 2.0, which will provide some support for garbage collection.)

Implement looping constructs efficiently, along the lines of [Richard Waters: "Automatic Transformation of Series Expressions into Loops", TOPLAS, XIII(1) p 52-98, January 1991].

Improve text editing support. Support some kind of Structured Regular Expressions, as in [Rob Pike: "The Text Editor Sam", Software Practice & Experience, XVII(11) 813-845, 1982.] Interface to WYSIWYG/editor, probably using the Interviews toolkit.

And then maybe one day I'll be able to get back to looking at the constraint and logic programming issues I discussed in [Per Bothner: "Efficiently Combining Logical Constraints with Functions", Stanford Computer Science, December 1988.]