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From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Porting UNIX Applications to the Mac
Message-ID: <1117@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Mon, 22-Sep-86 16:30:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1117
Posted: Mon Sep 22 16:30:19 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Sep-86 21:37:01 EDT
References: <8609170521.AA18527@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <1114@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Centram Systems, Berkeley
Lines: 32

I'd like to thank all the people who've replied on this issue so far.  I
hope to have time to deal with all the major points soon, but for now, I
just want to make a few comments.
 
First, I mentioned pseudo-ttys as a necessity in the original article; this
means that a psuedo-tty could easily be bound to a window interface for
those situations in which a command language interface is preferable.
 
Second, process interconnection with pipes fairly readily into an iconic
shell interface.  There would be a "pipe" icon on the desktop.  Clicking on
this would create a pipe-shaped icon; selecting application icons would then
link them together into a piped process sequence.  Finishing the select
would probably be best accomplished by clicking again on the pipe. Yes, it's
modal, but modality is not an absolute vice.
 
Third, I suggested that an "interface description language" (obviously not
IDL, the compiler language) could be implemented within the shell, and that
each application could have a formally-described graphic interface in this
way without having to run extra filter processes or modify the applications'
code.  Apparently this was not as clear as could be hoped.

Fourth, I think command-language fans are overlooking one of the chief
advantages of graphic interfaces, the impossibility of typing errors.

Again, many thanks!
-- 
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot and Self-Assigner of Pretentious Titles
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)

Engineers gleefully note the inability of artists to solve technical
problems, but angrily deny the atrophy of their own aesthetic sense.