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From: bilbo.geoff@CS.UCLA.EDU (Geoff Kuenning)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: For comment: problems with toolkit arg processing/philosophy
Message-ID: <8711092327.AA11580@maui.cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Mon, 9-Nov-87 18:27:31 EST
Article-I.D.: maui.8711092327.AA11580
Posted: Mon Nov  9 18:27:31 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Nov-87 21:32:55 EST
References: <8711080246.AA18134@gorodish.sun.com>
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Guy Harris writes:

> There's not even a single convention on UNIX systems; the "standard" in
> question is honored as much in the breach as in the observance.  Neither AT&T
> nor Sun have converted every command on their systems to agree with that
> convention, and frankly I suspect neither AT&T nor Sun will ever do so -
> there's too much history in old commands (care to guess how many shell files
> will break if "ed -" stops working?).

> The standard in question is more of a convention than a standard.  Nobody will
> shoot you if you write code that doesn't adhere to it; some people may curse
> you for it, and some may praise you for it.

This shows a rather severe misunderstanding of what a standard is and is for.
Let me point out that NFS is a standard, even though not everyone follows it.

Despite Guy's misunderstanding, and despite the fact that AT&T will never
completely rewrite history to conform to the standard, the standard *does*
exist, and those who choose to ignore it risk being ignored themselves.

As to the person who said that X is intended to run on many different systems,
please give me a break.  Do you really think DEC intends to force its VMS
users to accept UNIX-style switches on their VMS X utilities?  DEC, like
any professional organization, is going to have separate command-line
interfaces for separate operating systems.

	Geoff Kuenning	geoff@lcc.ucla.edu	geoff@ITcorp.com