24 Jul
2020
24 Jul
'20
6:04 a.m.
On Jul 20, 2020, at 2:02 PM, John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
The window had checkboxes corresponding to the options and text fields corresponding to
their values, if any. I can't remember if it parsed the output of --help or
equivalent, though.
It was all driven by data custom-created for each command, it wasn't done by parsing
-h (no --help in those days) or man pages. That would've been some combination of
research project and nightmare. (It also wasn't done the VMS way, by having a nice
set of libraries for defining commands and their arguments and flags and how to parse
them.)
I also don't recall if such commands were
supported in pipelines, though I see no reason why they should not have been.
At least in Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, what Commando produced for you was the
command line invocation, not the actual running process. So you'd type a command,
invoke Commando, and when you clicked OK the command line you were entering would be
updated with what you'd selected in the dialog box.
-- Chris