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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: re: tops-20 command 'language'
Message-ID: <212@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 22-Aug-83 01:31:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.212
Posted: Mon Aug 22 01:31:29 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Aug-83 20:05:24 EDT
References: sask.290, <1447@shark.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 16

I think command completion would work fine on UNIX, if it could be
implemented efficiently (e.g. the tty driver would have to be modified
to wakeup on several characters).  I've used versions of csh with
command completion (certainly at least file name completion worked well)
and liked them.  TOPS 20 may have only 50 builtin shell commands (compared
to about 10 in UNIX) but there are lots of user programs out there too.

There would certainly be problems with the notion of a PATH.  The implementations
I've seen just look in the current directory.  However, once a decision
is made, this wouldn't be much of a problem.

By the way, don't blame DEC for escape recognition.  BBN designed this
for TENEX over 10 years ago.  DEC just copied it into TOPS 20, which is
just a TENEX clone.  Kind of like USG copied vi from Berkeley.  (I don't
know if DEC rewrote the code or got it from BBN - USG certainly
got the vi code from Berkeley rather than rewrite it from scratch.)