From: mueller@cs.ubc.ca (Stephan Mueller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: MS-DOS
Date: 26 Jan 1993 18:47:27 -0800
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
NNTP-Posting-Host: giraf.cs.ubc.ca

In article <1993Jan22.014428.18920@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au> davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn) writes:
<about recursive file deletion>
>That doesn't help most users, who aren't aware of, and don't know how to find,
>PD utilities.  They'll do things the labourious way because they know no other.

True enough.  It is for the benefit of those people that I mentioned the
availability of PD tools.

>>  2) Windows NT's delete command has an option to
>>	 delete recursively.
>That doesn't help many people, either.

It may eventually.  Simply because keeping DOS and NT in sync with
respect to features where possible is in everyone's best interest.
Hence, if NT has it, perhaps DOS 6 will as well.

>>I'm afraid that the vast majority of DOS users are more concerned with 
>>backwards compabitility than features.  Why DOS is still primitive can 
>>be debated endlessly, but keep in mind that alternatives exist: 
>>including OS/2 (available since what, 1987?) and various varieties of 
>>Unix.   If people cared about better features in their OS they'd
>>buy these other products.  If Microsoft didn't work so hard to
>>remain backwards compatible, their users would be more upset than
>>they are with the lack of features.
>
>I don't see that improving the delete command (and, while they're at it,
>rename and copy, which could be merged with xcopy) and fixing the abort,
>retry, fail thing needs to affect compatibility.  Besides, they've never
>worried about compatibility between different versions of backup, which is
>yet another annoying thing with DOS.

I think that my comments on recursive deleting were independent of the
general backwards compatibility issue.  It's true enough that adding
enhancements to commands doesn't affect compatibility beyond perhaps
giving new meaning to a command like 'delete /s foo' which was formerly
illegal (DOS not allowing multiple filenames as arguments to delete) and
would (if DOS were enhanced) do something useful.  The basic mentality
wrt backwards compatibility that I've noticed (in numerous summers
spent at MS) is that 'we can't fix that, because someone, somewhere,
is using it in a way we never imagined, and can't predict.'  As a
straight forward example, the DOS command line will probably always
allow commands like 'cd..' and 'cd\foo' (note the lack of a space
between cd and its argument) because far too many people type things
like that.  Never mind that the first should try to run a program called
'cd..' and the second should run a program called foo in the directory
named 'cd' to be correct.  This is clearly a bug in the command line
parser.

Wrt backup, I've never used DOS's, so I wasn't aware that versions
were incompatible.  Can restore at least deal with backups created
with other versions of DOS?  Perhaps backup (which is, to be kind,
a pathetic program) is changed from DOS version to version because
MS expects that nobody actually uses it, and so it's harmless to
try to fix it, and could possibly make it useful?

stephan(third favourite food:  grand marnier cheesecake);

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy