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From: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng,net.nlang
Subject: Re: expert-friendly: are long names a waste of time?
Message-ID: <1003@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Nov-83 17:47:49 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1003
Posted: Tue Nov 29 17:47:49 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Dec-83 05:43:31 EST
References: watmath.6206
Lines: 17

I once used a system which had long names with several components,
separated by hyphens (don't use underscore, you have to shift to get to
that on most keyboards).  You could abbreviate any component of the
command (as long as the whole thing was unique).  This seemed to me to
be a pretty good compromise.  Thus, I don't have to type compile-p (to
distinguish it from compile-c), I can type c-p (which is probably not
unique, but you get the idea).  But, I can also type out the full name
if necessary.  This goes together pretty well with the "cross product"
theory of command composition.

(Of course, it's not clear to me why I really need different commands to
compile C and Pascal - the C compiler will only work on files whose
names end in .c anyway.  So why can't I just have a "compile" command
which figures out for itself which compiler to invoke. (Sorry for this
nit, it just bugs me sometimes.))

=Spencer