🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <?obH5jkm3@cs.psu.edu> schwartz@roke.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:
>One possible advantage of long names is that there can be consistency
>across applications, where a small number of descriptive names are
>used by many programs.  You have to pick really good names, of course.
>Single letter options have a harder time of it.  Multics is said to
>have given thought to this issue.

So did VMS.  On VMS if you knew one command, you knew most of them and could
guess what the right switches were.  It was very consistant across all of
the utilities.  Granted, there were some incosistancies, but they were
minor.  It did mean, however, that there were some things that were a little
harder to specify than might have been the case in a free from system.  Another
advantage was that ALL of the command line parsing was done in a library
call, so everybody behaved the same way.

TOPS-20 also had long command options.  There was also the same sort of system
call for TOPS-20, but it was radically different than the VMS version.  TOPS-20
also did some really nice command completion (not just file name completion)
that made it a joy to work with when you didn't happen to have all the manuals
on line.

Warner

-- 
Warner Losh		imp@Solbourne.COM	  MMP to DoD #882
"Red hair is caused by sugar and lust," the woman, who was blond, confided.
"Highly evolved beings do not indulge in sugar and lust." -- Tom Robbins