Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!watsol.waterloo.edu!tbray
From: tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray)
Subject: Re: UNIX mind-set  -> OK, OK!
Message-ID: <1991Jan19.181312.26929@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Owner of Many System Processes)
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <1991Jan13.113349.21937@ims.alaska.edu> <11305@lanl.gov> <1991Jan14.013815.11419@ims.alaska.edu> <9101141022.AA02013@iecc.cambridge.ma.us>
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 91 18:13:12 GMT
Lines: 26

johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:
 
 Having used both systems that do globbing in
 the shell (various forms of Unix) and systems that do globbing in the
 program (TOPS-10, Twenex and MS-DOS, among others, anyone else ever use
 DOS-11?)
 
I've done a lot of this in VMS, a long time ago.  VMS command line processing
is done through a combination of calling a command line parser (DCL$PARSE or
some such) and a bunch of RMS calls which do VMS-style file globbing.  The
ONE advantage this buys you is that you can do automatic globbing to support
things like

COPY *.FOO *.BAR

There are many disadvantages, but the two big ones are:

1. Coding up all this stuff is tedious (gag me with a XAB$_FAB)
time-consuming, and easy to get slightly wrong.
2. Partly because it's under program control, and partly because of #1,
it's REAL easy to get inconsistent behaviour.  This extends to things
such as the vms /OUTPUT=FOO vs. unix "> foo".

The unix model is a win.

Cheers, Tim Bray, Open Text Systems, Waterloo, Ontario