Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Pipes
Message-ID: <12391@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 7 Jun 90 17:34:14 GMT
References: <2533@zipeecs.umich.edu> <136735@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1990Jun6.104643.15176@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 46

In article <1990Jun6.104643.15176@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:

>In addition, "|" affords the Unix user the chance to push the whole set of
>commands in the background with two keystrokes, " &" at the end of the line,

The "|" character certainly does make things easier.  In any case, Chuck's
bottom line is correct, get WShell.  WShell interprets " | " as a pipe, 
knows about "&" at the end of the line, and does a bunch of other things
extremely well.  The only shell I use when I can help it.

>to recall the entire set of commands and repeat it as a single entity with
>"!!", and, if in one of the nicer shells that allows command line editing,
>to recall and edit as a single entity the entire set of commands comprising
>the piped set.

Well, even AmigaShell has better line editing than most UNIX shells.

>Looking at the Amiga implementation, like looking at the choice of "#?" for
>the wildcard (that I for one use on over half my typed lines), rather than
>the single keystroke "*", brings to mind the same question:  "Why did the
>Amiga developers go to the time, trouble, and expense  to design and
>implement something poorly, when an example of how to do it much better was
>conveniently at hand?"

As pointed out many times here before, the Amiga regular expression language
is far more powerful than the other models available at the time.  Now you're
really the one talking syntactic sugar.  Sure, "*" could be substituted for
"#?", but what do you substitute for FILE#(A|B|C#E??).(C|O), or a similar 
AmigaDOS pattern?  The only thing that comes close is the grep language,
which isn't used for file naming, but that has the disadvantage of using a
number of common file characters, such as ".", as part of its regular 
expression language.  I would be annoyed if I had to type "more thing\.c"
or some-such; the file-patten language shouldn't often intrude on your normal
work.  Different isn't always better, different just to be different rarely
is, but different with a valid reason behind it usually is.  I'm still 
surprised by how much NUH (Not Used Here) is to be found in the minds of 
normally intelligent people (in general, I'm not trying to flame Kent here
for this relatively minor transgression...).

>Kent, the man from xanth.


-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
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	"I have been given the freedom to do as I see fit" -REM