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From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: QUITLIST
Message-ID: <30172@think.UUCP>
Date: 2 Nov 88 17:07:37 GMT
References: <4190@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
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Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Lines: 38


I saw many problems and misconceptions in the "quit list" that was
posted.  One misconception was to label "ctl-D" as performing logout,
presumably referring to Unix.  ctl-D does NOT mean logout in Unix, it
means end-of-file; most Unix programs exit when they reach the end of
their input stream, and when a login shell exits you are logged out.

A general problem with the list was that many different concepts were
being lumped under the name "quitting".  For instance, the list
included Kermit's ctl-] operation, which is merely an escape that
suspends the terminal emulation portion of the program so that the
user can issue Kermit commands.  In order to quit the program the user
must still type "quit".

I agree with the general philosophy that this is a simple area that
could, and probably should, be standard.  However, different user
interface styles frequently force differences even in such a simple
thing.  For instance, if a program author wants to provide one-letter
abbreviations for common commands, and Q is being used for something
already, he might choose to call his quitting command "Exit" so that
the "E" abbreviation can be used.  User interface issues are too
complicated to try to standardize on anything at this point.

Jan included an analogy with cars, pointing out that all cars have the
gas, brake, and clutch pedals in the same places.  I suspect this
wasn't true in the first decade or so of the automotive industry, and
computer user interfaces are still at that stage (mostly because
computers keep changing so quickly that it not useful to try to
standardize).  I also think that car pedals are probably more properly
compared with computer keyboards, which are much more standardized.
To illustrate that the automotive industry still has user interface
problems, I got into my mother's car a couple of weeks ago and spent
fifteen minutes finding all the light controls.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar