Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!oliveb!amiga!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: AmigaDos vs Unix wildcards/pathnames
Message-ID: <6252@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 89 17:49:44 GMT
References: <876@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 48

in article <876@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>, jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (Jim Wright) says:

> In article <6235@cbmvax.UUCP> daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes:

> |	Delete #?(.cp|.h|%) 

> Is "%" a literal character in this context or is it a pattern
> matching specification?  

Well, it was a silly example, but "%" matches the empty set.  Which of 
course, in that example, would expand to:

	Delete #?.cp #?.h #?

But hopefully everyone gets the idea.

> ...AmigaDOS ones don't *seem* to be well documented to for
> the average user.  It's hard to use them without knowing them.

That is true, or at least it used to be back in the A1000 days, when you
didn't get an AmigaDOS manual at all with the system.  It also appears to
me that many folks out there don't do anything more sophisticated with
wild cards than what you can do in UNIX with "*" and "?".  That does mean
you might get a little be less frustrated switching over to VMS or MS-DOS,
but really LIKE to have powerful wild cards.  I really use alternation,
etc, all the time.  Even for folks who don't want anything more than "*"
and "?", if you can't mentally substitute "#?" for "*", you're either just
being stubborn or you probably don't won't know what to do with anything
more sophisticated than MS-DOS anyway, so why bother with an Amiga.

> Which leads to what I consider the other half of the problem.
> Making use of the full wildcarding system should be trivially
> simple for programmers.  If it were easy to get at, everyone
> would use it.  Sounds like a great candidate for library routines
> to me.

I don't think you'll get much argument on that one.  A standard library
routine would make all pattern matching consistent, and extend it's use
throughout the system, such as in file requesters.

> |Dave Haynie  "The 32 Bit Guy"     Commodore-Amiga  "The Crew That Never Rests"

> Jim Wright
> jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu
-- 
Dave Haynie  "The 32 Bit Guy"     Commodore-Amiga  "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: D-DAVE H     BIX: hazy
              Amiga -- It's not just a job, it's an obsession