Xref: utzoo comp.os.misc:349 comp.unix.wizards:5791
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From: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Command interfaces
Message-ID: <5754@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: 16 Dec 87 08:09:36 GMT
References: <1257@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <6840002@hpcllmv.HP.COM> <9555@mimsy.UUCP> <798@rocky.STANFORD.EDU> <432@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <3161@psuvax1.psu.edu> <5565@oberon.USC.EDU> <142@piring.cwi.nl>
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Reply-To: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson)
Organization: USC AIS, Los Angeles
Lines: 56

In article <142@piring.cwi.nl> jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen) writes:
>Uhm, yes, unfortunately I find the 'feature' quite unusable.
>I *never* come up with the correct sequence of == and @@, so I have to type
>the command three times before I get it right. (really retype, that is.

As with most user interface questions, it is a matter of personal
preference and what you are used to.

>'History mechanism' is something primos has never heard about).

There are at least two command line editors for primos 19.4 and later
on the market, two I know of being passed around, and one included
with primos 21.0 that works with prior version of primos.  (The best
of the lot in my opinion - I like emacs.)  The only os I know of that
has such a wide variety is unix -- but with unix you have to replace
your whole shell to switch command line editors.

>I definitely prefer
>for i in *.[ch]; do
>    diff old/$i $i >$i.diff
>done

I never had time to dig to deep into my unix manuals for this.  It
doen't look any more intuitive to me than the primos example.

>And, to continue some gripes on primos wildcards:
>- I would expect them to work *always*. I.e. if I do
>  TYPE @@
>  (TYPE is primos echo) I would expect a list of all files, *not* '@@'.

Well, fix your expectations.  Wildcards should only be expaned where
filenames are expected.

>- If I want all arguments on one line, and I use [WILD @@.TMP], and the
>  result doesn't fit in 80 characters, I DO DEFINITELY NOT WANT IT TO TRUNCATE
>  IT AT EIGHTY CHARS! I lost an important file that way: it was trying

A.  No standard primos command expects a list of files like this.

B.  The only limit I know of is 160 characters not 80: it applies to
commands directly typed to the command processor (not as a result of
function calls like wild) and the commands that get their command line
from the ancient rdtk$$ call -- anything writen since 19.4 has no
reason to use this and many good reasons not to that I won't list
here.  (Prime is gradually changing over on their utilites.)

C.  There is a limit of 1024 characters for command lines after function
expantion.  If this limit is exceeded, an error message is generated and
the command is not executed.

Therfore, I conclude that this problem must have been a programmer error:
using rdtk$$ to read a command line that should be expected to be long.
Bob Larson	Arpa: Blarson@Ecla.Usc.Edu	blarson@skat.usc.edu
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