Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!clyde.concordia.ca!maxwell!smw From: smw@maxwell.Concordia.CA ( Steven M. Winikoff) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Need input for future DOS release Keywords: future DOS release Message-ID: <2032@clyde.concordia.ca> Date: 28 Mar 90 17:42:52 GMT References: <53686@microsoft.UUCP> <2017@clyde.concordia.ca> <1990Mar22.202023.25752@seri.gov> <2019@clyde.concordia.ca> <260E5BA2.4917@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> Sender: usenet@clyde.concordia.ca Reply-To: smw@maxwell.Concordia.CA ( Steven M. Winikoff) Organization: Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec Lines: 76 > = cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) >> = smw@maxwell.Concordia.CA ( Steven Winikoff ) ----------------------------------------------------- >> ...but many older programs don't know about >> things like environment variables, or bother to remember the directory they >> were called from originally... (Can you say "WordStar"? I thought you >> could. Pre-5.x, of course.) > The reason is that you can't find out what path you were executed from > unless you're using DOS 3 or better. Of course, this is no excuse for > being too lazy to add code to check for DOS 3 and, if so, keep track of > where you were invoked from ... Ah, but that's the point. It doesn't really matter whether the software in question is so old that it wasn't possible to handle directories at the time (in fact WordStar 3.3 was written before MS-DOS even *had* subdirectories, if my memory is correct...), or if it's simply a question of laziness on the part of the programmer. It's still a nuisance to use software that, in today's terms, is brain-damaged. It would simply be nice, IMHO, if the OS could be rewritten to make the problem go away. >>> 6) The ability to SET PATH=C:\NEWDIR;%PATH% outside of a batch file. >> Another good idea. It really wouldn't cost anything to increase the size of >> the command line buffer, would it now? > No it wouldn't ... except that then users would expect that they could >pass a huge command line to an external command and would start complaining >of a bug in DOS. Ouch. There's no such thing as a perfect world, is there? > Moving files without copying, for example, has been part of the DOS > RENAME function call since the idea of paths came along. It's just that > COMMAND.COM's designers decided they didn't want us to be able to do that. Sure. Changing that now, however, couldn't be particularly difficult, and would certainly be upward compatible! >>> 12) Windows built in. >> Who could argue with that? > As long as I'm allowed to wipe it off my hard drive and it doesn't > increase the price of DOS, I don't mind. But I don't want to be forced > to pay for it and have it clutter up my memory and hard disk and degrade > system performance just because I may want a new version of DOS. That's basically what I had in mind myself. Of course, the original idea came from Marshall Buhl, and I can't presume to speak for him. >> I wonder if it would pay for Microsoft to license some of the Norton >> Utilities (LD, FS, FA, etc. come to mind at this point...) > Most of those really aren't hard to write ... the only reason people > are so thrilled with many of them is that Norton did them right, and DOS > either didn't do them, did them wrong, or did them far too late. Writing > a program like FA would take an experienced programmer a couple of hours. Of course... but who wants to keep reinventing the wheel? > But you do have a good point. Microsoft should have a close look at > the features of various toolkit packages, make a note of some of the things > they do, and write their own to do those functions. That's exactly what I'm hoping for. I've even written similar things myself. But the point is that it would be nice to have these utilities centralized in the OS, rather than have to carry a box of diskettes with me whenever I'm asked to help out a friend (or a client!) who doesn't happen to have my own idea of the "perfect" utility set! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Steven Winikoff smw@maxwell.concordia.ca Software Analyst Dept. of Computing services Concordia University voice: (514) 848-7619 Montreal, Quebec, Canada (10:00-18:00 EST)