From: t-piersh@microsoft.com (Piers Haken)
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Date: 30 Aug 92 05:51:56 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA 98052

In article <1992Aug28.080035.15100@rdg.dec.com> goodwin@edieng.enet.dec.com (Pete Goodwin) writes:
>
>In article <1992Aug27.083907.25862@rtf.bt.co.uk>, duplain@rtf.bt.co.uk (Andy Duplain) writes...
>
>>	Simpler than the bourne/korn/C shell ?  Don't you think it's quite
>>	straight-forward ?  Why I say it is expert friendly, is because the
>>	utility names and the way they are used is alien to most new users
>>	(who have been tainted with MS-DOS utility names); once you are
>>	used to it, you find it was worth the effort to get there.
>
>I'm sorry but DIR suggests DIRECTORY, TYPE suggests TYPE a file, PRINT suggests
>PRINT a file, SEARCH suggests search.
>
>Now does ls suggest directory, or cat sugggest type or lpr suggest print or
>grep suggest search??? The one command I took from UNIX was cd, which I equate
>to SET DEF in VMS.
>

Sorry, I'm going to flame here. There is a distinct phylosophy behind]
the naming of most of the original UNIX comands. The idea was that they
would NOT contain wnglish words which described their function but would
HINT at their use (or be related to it). Also they would be distinct
enought to be easily rememberable and also easy to type (remember BASIC
keywords?).
Personally, 'ls' hints at listing something. 'cat' is short for catenate
(RTFM), originally it did not default to /dev/tty. 'lpr' line-printer.
grep (or rather g/RE/p) tands for global regular expression print.s a 

>Admittedly I'm comparing UNIX with VMS, but the barrier here is the utility
>names are cryptic. They DON'T need to be!!!

That's the whole point about the UNIX shell - you write you're own stuff
in the shell by catonating commands with pipes (and you don't need to
write any code).
>
>Now on RISC OS TYPE is TYPE, LIST is, er, TYPE, PRINT is, er TYPE (why the
>three variations I wonder!), DIR is set directory (nothing like a departure
>eh?), CAT is Catalog (logical I suppose). At least COPY is copy, RENAME is
>rename rather than UNIX: cp or mv.

This has something to do with phoenetics, they are the 'hard vowels', I'm 
not sure what their correct name is...

>
>Whenever I read UNIX shell scripts they read like gibberish. Full of strange
>characters like ~ ` ' # or $. You need to be a real expert to see what's going
>on.

This is mainly due to the fact that because you can actually do things
in the UNIX shells, people DO. Consider oneof the simplest of operations
in UNIX, piping the output of a command to a file. In RISCOS you have to
enclose your redirection command in '{}'s. And why the hell they didn't
support command line piping in GOS - even using temporary files would have
done - even COMMAND.COM can do this. Being able to use 'gibberish' in
your scripts actually adds a hell of a lot of functionality and alleviates
the need to write code to do even simple things. I miss being able to do
things like '<command> | more' or 'zcat *.Z | tar -xvf -', okay so, it
looks a bit ominous to those who don't know what it means, but once you've
sat down and used it for a bit - it's a dream.

>
>>	The backspace/delete cock-up effects you when using an editor,
>>	regardless of whether the editor was invoked from CLI or DeskTop.
>
>Only if you've been tainted by MSDOS (using you're description 8) I've never
>used backspace as delete, I've always used DELETE.

Alternatively you could use an operating system whose terminal characteristics
are alterable. stty erase ^V^?.

>
>Pete Goodwin
>goodwin@system.enet.dec.com

My advice : wait for Compaq to release their P5 machine range, buy one,
and run Linux on it. You'll get:
1) A f**k-off powerful machine.
2) A free OS.
3) Friendly support.
4) Upgrades even before they're ready.
5) X-windows.
6) the ability to use gibberish at will.

Piers.
-- 
Disclaimer: These views are my own and not necessarily
            those of the company for which I work.