Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sco!gorn!filbo
From: filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us (Bela Lubkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Commodore and UNIX in AmigaWorld 68030
Keywords: UNIX CBM 68030 "gangly"
Message-ID: <101.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us>
Date: 14 Dec 89 18:04:16 GMT
References: <476806de.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Distribution: na
Lines: 37
X-Claimer: I >am< R Pentomino!

In article <476806de.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> Steve Rehrauer writes:
>VMS' command-language badly suffers from verbose syntax and
>excessive "slashism"; "SHOW this and that / except=blah / foo / bletch=45".
>I may know that I want to "SHOW" something, but arriving at the arcane
>sentence to do it isn't always trivial.  Most of the experienced VMS people
>I know have a long list of abbrevs & symbols they setup at login, and what
>they type at the VMS "$" isn't usually much less obscure than the Unix
>commands you're complaining about.  But it IS *SHORTER* than the stupid
>"raw" VMS commands, and that's why they do it!

What's your point?  [*]  Most of the experienced UNIX people I know have a
long list of aliases and shell scripts.  If I want to "SHOW" something
under UNIX I have to figure out what command to use; the search space is
the entire (C) or (1) section of the manual, plus others.  I might need
ps, stty, who, vmstat, netstat, or any of a couple of dozen other
commands.  "SHOW" under VMS collects those things together.

If you want short+cryptic, you can abbreviate most everything in VMS.
'pwd' under UNIX, or 'SHOW DIRECTORY' or 'SH DIR' under VMS.  'ls -l' or
'DIR/FULL', 'DIR/F' (which gives you waay more stuff than you ever
wanted to see).  Of course I haven't used VMS since version 3.7 so I may
be a bit behind on this stuff... ;-}

What about AmigaDOS?  Keywords are implied rather than explicit -- UNIX
uses '-', VMS uses '/', but AmigaDOS uses ' ' to signify keywords.  This
leads to ambiguity such as the recent thread on 'delete a' -- is 'a' a
keyword (short for 'ask') or a filename?  The command structure as a
whole (meaning the set of commands in the standard OS distribution) is
neither clear nor consistant, but I would rate it better than UNIX in
that respect.  It is probably clearer than VMS as well, if only because
it doesn't try to cover as much ground.

[*] Read my tone as 'discussion', not 'flame'; that's how it's intended...

Bela Lubkin    * *    //  filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us  CI$: 73047,1112 (slow)
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