Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!mailrus!ukma!gatech!gtss!chas
From: chas@gtss.gatech.edu (Charles Cleveland)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: wildcards/pathnames (+suggestion)
Message-ID: <396@gtss.gatech.edu>
Date: 19 Mar 89 15:18:30 GMT
References: <352@sagpd1.UUCP> <6294@cbmvax.UUCP> <11242@ut-emx.UUCP> <6317@cbmvax.UUCP> <45@xenlink.UUCP>
Reply-To: chas@gtss.UUCP (Charles Cleveland)
Organization: Georgia Tech School of Physics
Lines: 45

In article <45@xenlink.UUCP> deraadt@xenlink.UUCP (Theo A. DeRaadt) writes:
)So, every day. Unix. Amiga. Unix. Amiga. You don't get used to how
)bad the Amiga commands are.
) <tdr.

What a wimp.

Every day.  Unix.  AmigaDOS.  VMS.  NOS.  NOS/VE.  CTSS.  Sun
keyboard.  VT240 keyboard.  Amiga 1000 keyboard.  IBM-PC keyboard (or
almost equivalently, IRIS keyboard).  Editing using FSE, EDIF, vi, emacs,
EDT, and several little custom numbers the irrepressible-reinventers-of-the-
wheel at MFECC churned out.  With a little experience, working in multiple
environments becomes second nature.  The only real problem I have is using the
IBM-PC keyboard -- whoever designed that zonker should be strung up at COMDEX
and allowed to twist in the wind.

Unix is not the only other OS on the planet besides AmigaDOS.  If Unix and
AmigaDOS wildcard conventions converged, I would hardly notice.  The Amiga
commands are fine.

The biggest problem is changing machines (or OS's) without changing
'terminals'.  Please, Commodore, make it OBVIOUS whether the user is using
UNIX or AmigaDOS.  It would really help us make the context switch.

The suggestion:
The wildcard.library proposed in this group (seems like a nice project,
doesn't it?) could be made to work with an environment variable which indicates
which wildcard.library (standard AmigaDOS, the default.  UNIX.  whatever.)
the user wants to use.  The application checks the env. variable and tries to
open the appropriate library.  We would just have to agree what the functions
in such a library should be called and what they should return.  Is it as
simple as one external routine called ParseWildCard() that accepts one
char *argv[] as input, and for output an char **argv2[] and a char *string to
hold the parsed input line (and I guess we better also input the maximum
number of parsed arguments and the maximum number of characters in the parsed
input line)?  Other suggestions or ideas?

Of course, it would have to be supported by Commodore, since their commands
would have to check the environment variable too.  But people using both
AmigaDOS and UNIX on the same machine might regard this as a real feature.
-- 
"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it." -- Alex Schure

Charles Cleveland   Georgia Tech School of Physics   Atlanta, GA 30332-0430
UUCP: ...!gatech!gtss!chas                  INTERNET:  chas@gtss.gatech.edu