🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5237@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>> (True, you won't need to
>> worry about receiving and parsing RexxMsgs, but once you have the code to 
>> do this, it is fairly easy to drop into an application.)  
>
>Yes, but with the code already written you can make sure that each program
>supports a consistent syntax. This isn't such a big deal now, perhaps, but
>look at all the UNIX commands that don't conform to any sane standard because
>no standard argument parser existed.

Amen!

That is one thing that has really bugged me about UNIX.  UNIX commands
tend to use single character flags, which is fine, but they rarely
have a consistent meaning between any two commands, which is really
confusing.  TAR comes to mind as one that I always have to read the
man page before I use it.  "r" is the flag for writing, and "t" for
listing???

To paraphrase what Apple says about the Macintosh user interface, "All
programs should interface with the user in similar, consistent
manners, so that the users will know what to expect."  The Amiga
Intuition manual echos this, as have a lot of frustrated users I've
known.  I think it's an excellent rule of thumb; users will be able to
learn your software that much more easily.

This is especially useful to anyone who agrees with UNIX's philosophy
of having many small tools, each doing it's one thing and doing it
well, which can be glued at a whim into larger, more useful
applications.  Pipes are not that great, but from what I hear ARexx
comes much closer.  Consistent interfaces (via TCL or another agent)
will make life easier for everyone, and will make ARexx that much more
popular. 

Peter da Silva's suggestion that programs with ARexx ports each
support a consistant syntax is right on!

							-eric hopp
							 hopp@stolaf.edu