Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!esquire!sbb
From: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac Interface v. "Command Line" interface debates
Message-ID: <958@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jan 89 20:40:49 GMT
References: <15213@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 47

In article <15213@mimsy.UUCP> folta@tove.umd.edu.UUCP writes:
>[ No parallel on the Mac to Unix pipes ]
>[This lack] cannot really be answered, except by concentrating power
>in individual applications, so that tasks commonly performed with
>multiple programs can be done in one program.  This solution is not as
>elegant as pipes, but Mac word processors do everything that you would
>have to use about 3 nroff pre-processors to do.

This brings to mind another issue, and possible deficiency of the Mac
(at least relative to command-line programs).  Look at how much time
Stuffit spends putting up, taking down, and redrawing its windows.  It
seems to be a significant portion of the time it takes to "unstuff",
especially if there are a lot of little files in the archive.

It gets so bad at times that I'm tempted to write a program that just
unstuffs an archive, but doesn't display anything on the screen except
maybe a spinning watch.  One of the things I like about MacCompress is
that it just goes ahead and compresses a file (or files) and tells you
when it's done.

To see what I mean, do a ``multiple add'' in Stuffit of a folder full
of text files (of a few K each) using Lempel-Ziv compression.  Then
tell MacCompress to do the same thing.  Big difference, and I don't
think it's because Ray Lau is a bad programmer.

In answer to the comment above, most Mac word processors don't even
come close to what can be done in a Unix environment, even by relative
novices.  It's just too difficult to build everything into a single
application -- and too easy for people running editors under Unix to
mark a block of text and pipe it through ``sort'' or ``spell''.  Forget
about regular expressions (I thank God every day that Microsoft Word at
least lets you search for things such as paragraph marks).

Of course, it should be noted that programs on the PC suffer from this
very same deficiency -- it's not at all Mac-specific.  All in all, a
command-line interface on the Mac would be useful.  Power users could
use it, and novices could ignore it.  Even though the Mac itself
doesn't support multiprocessing in the same way as Unix, the MPW shell
does support it's version of pipes, and making this (or something like
this) available outside the MPW environment would probably be a good
thing.

-- 
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   cmcl2!esquire!sbb            | 
   esquire!sbb@cmcl2.nyu.edu    |                           - David Letterman