Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!enea!kuling!irf
From: irf@kuling.UUCP (Stellan Bergman)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: OS features
Message-ID: <588@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 17 Dec 87 22:26:48 GMT
References: <1971@cup.portal.com> <1169@nmtsun.nmt.edu>
Reply-To: irf@kuling.UUCP (Stellan Bergman)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 28

In article <1169@nmtsun.nmt.edu> hydrovax@nmtsun.nmt.edu (M. Warner Losh) writes:
>This is a simple concept.  When the user has typed in enough of the command
>to make it unique and hits a specified key (usually ESCAPE in TOPS-20), the
>rest of the command appears "by magic".  This may be difficult to understand
>from a unix point of view, since all of the commands are cryptic beyond
>believe (they can be learned, but it is painful).  In contrast the TOPS-20

No, it is not since I have exactly the same behavior on my HP-UX 'csh' (and
also on the 'tcsh' on the VAX 4.2BSD I'm running at this moment. And the
names are not fixed.  The commands just happen to be invoked by default by
the name of the file.  These names are beautiful and not so little amusing
therefore *easy* to remember.  They may be changed very easily (see next
comment of mine).

>and VMS commands are long and verbose, allowing you to know EXACTLY (or
>nearly so) what is going down.  For example, on TOPS-20, to print a file
>you type
>@ PRint (file) Foo.txt /Copies:2

Again in my 'csh' or 'tcsh' I'd write : "alias p lp", "alias print lp"
which would do a listing by either the single letter command 'p' or
the full name command 'print'.  But who would do such a stupid thing
to replace 'lp' with 'print' and thereby wasting almost a second typing
in superfluous letters :-).  As I usually say: I'm giving my computers orders
-- not writing novels...  Any military officer knows that orders should be
short and precise.
 
Bo Thide', Swedish Institute of Space Physics   UUCP: ...enea!kuling!irfu!bt