Re: [COFF] Other OSes?

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 7:28 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote: csh has had filename auto-completion since the late 70s or early 80s, though nowhere as rich or as full-featured as bash/zsh, let alone TOPS-20. [...] This. Much of the issue with Unix was convention, or rather, lack of a consistent convention. Proponents of DEC operating systems that I've known decry that Unix can't do stuff like, `RENAME *.FTN *.FOR`, because the shell does wildcard expansion. Unix people I know will retort that that behavior depends on programming against specific libraries. I think the big difference is that the DEC systems really encouraged using those libraries and made their use idiomatic and trivial; it was such a common convention that NOT doing it that way was extraordinary. On the other hand, Unix never mandated any specific way to do these things; as a result, everyone their own thing. How many times have you looked at a Unix utility of, er, a certain age, and seen `main()` start something like: main(argc, argv) int argc; char *argv[]; { if (--argc > 0 && *argv[1] == '-') { argv++; while (*++*argv) switch (**argv) { case 'a': /* etc.... */ continue; } } /* And so on.... */ I mean, goodness: we didn't even use getopt(3)! It was all hand-rolled! And thus inconsistent. Cisco's CLI is a great model for this. It would This is unsurprising as the Cisco CLI is very clearly modeled after TOPS-20/TENEX which did all of those things (much of which was in the CMND JSYS after work transferred to DEC and TENEX became TOPS-20). It's definitely one of the cooler features of twenex. - Dan C.