Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!TEMP.IUS.CS.CMU.EDU!ralphw From: ralphw@TEMP.IUS.CS.CMU.EDU (Ralph Hyre) Newsgroups: comp.os.misc Subject: Re: completion Message-ID: <535@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> Date: 17 Dec 87 15:26:13 GMT References: <1971@cup.portal.com> <1169@nmtsun.nmt.edu> <9827@mimsy.UUCP> Sender: netnews@PT.CS.CMU.EDU Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI Lines: 17 In article <9827@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes: >Completion is nice. It lets one abbreviate; one need not remember >the exact spelling of some command or option; and so forth. Agreed > >Completion is bad. The moment there is a new command or option, >the old subnames no longer work. This is why I always hitor as part of the abbreviation. If there's a new command which makes the abbreviation ambiguous, the system beeps at me. In any event, having completion is ALWAYS better than not having it. Without completion, you don't even have the choice of having abbreviations, unless you want to define an alias for everything. You still have the new command problem, though. It's interesting to thinkg about completion interacting with a spelling-correcting (DWIM, type 'sl' and you get 'ls') front-end.