Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!julian!uwovax!7103_300
From: 7103_300@uwovax.uwo.ca (Eric Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: GEMDOS Extended Argument Standard
Message-ID: <1989@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Date: 3 Apr 89 00:04:20 GMT
References: <1405@atari.UUCP> <1424@atari.UUCP>
Lines: 22
Organisation: University of Western Ontario, Canada

In article <1424@atari.UUCP>, kbad@atari.UUCP (Ken Badertscher) Dwrites:
>   So... here's GEMDOS Extended Argument Standard proposal #2:
< description of proposal omitted >

That doesn't sound too bad, but I liked the MWC proposal better, mostly
because it's in use already. Creating an entirely new proposal means that
*nothing* currently in existence will work with the new standard.

One potential problem I see with the 2nd proposal is the suggestion that
programs stick a "126" in for the argument length if they have set up
a valid ARGV= vector. This could still break old programs that are
expecting a valid length count. On the other hand, if the extended argument
passing scheme is only used for very long command lines, then argv[0] is
unusuable most of the time. Finally, seperating the arguments with white
space makes it impossible to pass arguments containing blanks, a minus
for programs like "grep".
--
Eric R. Smith                      email:
Dept. of Mathematics               7103_300@uwovax.uwo.ca
University of Western Ontario      7103_300@uwovax.bitnet
London, Ont. Canada N6A 5B7    (a shared mailbox: put my name on
ph: (519) 661-3638              the Subj: line, please!)