Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!hplabs!hp-pcd!hpcvca!charles
From: charles@hpcvca.HP.COM (Charles Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Grow your own VI (Re: AVI editor)
Message-ID: <5660007@hpcvca.HP.COM>
Date: 18 Aug 88 23:46:22 GMT
References: <2424@sugar.uu.net>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Co., Corvallis, Oregon
Lines: 24

> Yup.  In fact, vi/ex/view/edit/e actually has five names, but all
> are the same program.  Check the links, and the Makefile in
> /usr/src/ucb/ex.  What is *really* gross (IMHO) is that the way the
> same program funtions as three different ones (according to our local
> Unix expert) is by checking to see argv[0] to see what name the user
> invoked the program as.
> -- 
> Christopher Lishka	...!{rutgers|ucbvax|...}!uwvax!uwslh!lishka

Why is this gross?  The 5 programs need substantially the same code.
If this wasn't done you would either need 5 separate binarys (taking
about 4 times as much disk space as the current links do) or you would
have to invoke the (only) program with different options for each of
the 5 functionalitys.
	ex -> editor -e
	vi -> editor -v
		etc.
Yuk!  Not only is that more verbose and harder to type, it is harder
to remember.  It also does not work with EDITOR envariables.

For these reasons I sorely miss file links, which are missing from
AmigaDo*.  I want to be able to do exactly the same thing on my Amiga.
--
	Charles Brown