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From: mic@ut-ngp.UUCP (Mic Kaczmarczik)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Pattern Matching & documentation
Message-ID: <4421@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Dec-86 19:21:10 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.4421
Posted: Thu Dec 11 19:21:10 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Dec-86 22:44:53 EST
References: <954@blia.BLI.COM> <1731@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: mic@ngp.UUCP (Mic Kaczmarczik)
Organization: UTexas Computation Center, Austin, Texas
Lines: 37
Summary: TOPS-20 COMND JSYS, anyone?

has a description of it's arguments hidden in
>a file somewhere, and the command processor (DCL) checks that. Prompts
>for missing arguments, globbing against apropriate universes,
>type-checking on arguments; ALL provided by DCL! Carried to extremes,
>you even get auto-completion on arguments.
>
>Anyone want to do a DCL-like shell for AmigaDOS? :-)
>
>	<mike

How about a TOPS-20 EXEC-like shell, with filename expansion, instant
help text, and noise words? Although the TOPS-20 approach is similar
to VMS, TOPS-20 programs invoke a subroutine library to parse command
lines an item at a time.  DCL uses a table (stored as an executable
image, hint, hint) to parse the command line before the program is
even loaded, so the program has no chance to intervene during command
parsing.  Of course, the programmer has to do even *more* work, so I
suppose I could live with table-driven parsing, as long as I could use
question mark and command completion :-)

There is code in Amiga Kermit to do this sort of thing already, but it
would need some work to put it into a shell.  If anybody writes a
shell like this, PLEASE put as much of the code as you can into
reentrant *libraries*, so you don't pay as large a penalty for having
more than one shell loaded!  That's the reason I'm sticking with the
CLI; I just can't see spending 20-40K worth of memory on my poor
little 512K system just to run another copy of a shell...

--mic--