Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cec2!jcb2647
From: jcb2647@cec1.wustl.edu (James Christopher Beard)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Need input for future DOS release
Keywords: future DOS release
Message-ID: <1990Mar27.184657.12589@cec1.wustl.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 90 18:46:57 GMT
References: <53686@microsoft.UUCP> <2017@clyde.concordia.ca> <1990Mar22.202023.25752@seri.gov> <2019@clyde.concordia.ca> <18888@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Sender: news@cec2 (USENET News System)
Reply-To: jcb2647@cec2.UUCP (James Christopher Beard)
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Lines: 34

I think the first step in upgrading DOS is to add the things that
innumerable programmers have added one by one on their own as TSR's.
4DOS, a replacement command processor from J.P. Software, incorporates
most of these fixes in one place, including 

- command-line editing combined with command histories (in a far more
  useful form than unix's c-shell provides), 

- aliases (with replaceable parameters and environment variables),

- command completion, 

- file selection from command-line wildcards (something sh and csh
  don't have in anything like as useful a form)

- built-in help

- batch file enhancements like IFF...ENDIFF, GOSUB, INPUT, INKEY, ...
  (Note that MS's WHAT command, included as a demo with some past
  versions of MASM, provides some of the system information and
  user-input features that batch files need and 4DOS supplies.)

- LOCAL and ENDLOCAL commands to allow explicit differentiation of
  child environments without launching child shells.

I've probably left some out.  Note that 4DOS includes many Unix shell
features, often in a more-usable form.  But one thing that DOS/4DOS
batch files sadly lack is the ability to capture standard output of a
command in an expression, as in csh lines using the `...` construct.
This is enormously useful, and there's simply no DOS work-around that
reproduces it.  (Almost as good would be an ability to redirect
standard output to the value of an environment variable.)

Jamie Beard (beard@wuibc2.wustl.edu)