Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cica!iuvax!rutgers!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Wildcards
Message-ID: <10210@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 16 Mar 90 15:26:33 GMT
References: <102618@linus.UUCP>
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 55

In article <102618@linus.UUCP> duncant@mbunix.mitre.org (Thomson) writes:
>In article peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

>>Scripts would probably run with quotewild on by default, and the more powerful
>>amiga-style wildcards, and interactive shells would turn quotewild off and use
>>the terser unix-style wildcards.

>|I am surprised at the use of the phrase "more powerful amiga-style wildcards".
>More powerful than what?  Everything you can do with # and ? you can doo
>with * and ?, not jsut on unix, but also on VMS and (to some extent) on DOS.

Really?  I think you should read up on AmigaDOS wildcards (and probably UNIX
too).  Using just * and ?, please construct a single pattern that meets
these requirements:

	MATCH			DON'T MATCH

	Foo.Bar			Fxx.Bxr
	Foo.Baar		Fx.Bxxxr
	Fo.Baaar

The answer, in AmigaDOS-speak, using only the # and ? metacharacters (which
is an absurd example, since most interesting cases, rather than this 
carefully constructed on, often use at the (, ), and | metacharacters):

	F#o.B#ar

You can make a pattern that'll match that in UNIX, but not with your
restricted set of * and ? only.

>I never understood where the AmigaDos wildcard conventions came from.  

Well, TriPos, basically.  But the logic behind it is that, rather than
simple wildcards, you have a reasonable regular expression language.
The "*" convention would be a waste of a metacharacter.  The one that's
missing (but hopefully in 1.4) is a negation character.

>Why deviate from a widely used convention in favor of a new one which 
>noone is familiar with?

Only the degenerate case of *? is widely used, and even then, the actual
meaning varies between systems.  If you don't believe that, try just *
under Apollo's DomainOS/Aegis sometime.  The obvious answer to your
question, of course, is the standard one: new conventions are adpoted
because they are considered better.  That's why I traded my C128 for an
Amiga in the first place, why I program in C or C++ most of the time 
rather than BASIC, why I find a GUI occasionally useful even though it's
not as "widely used" as a command-line interface.  Etc.

>Duncan Thomson

-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Systems Engineering) "The Crew That Never Rests"
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                    Too much of everything is just enough