Y
YKhan
Called the Monad shell, or MSH. It's supposed to be similar to BASH on
Unix environments.
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050609_170105.html
Unix environments.
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050609_170105.html
G
Grumble
YKhan said:
I can't help but read Gonad shell. (The shell real men use.)
A
A Jones
I just hope Monad isn't as bad as bash. Granted, it's taken Microsoft
over 20 years to come up with a command line any better than DOS, so
there's no reason to expect anything much from them, but Holy crap, let
it not be as bad as bash. It's been 30 -- count 'em -- 30 years that Unix
has given us this fragmented, forked, standards uncompliant,
horrifically architected, spaghetti coded, unformalized, unspecified,
poorly documented, parade of the goofiest, most totally inept and inane
command shell/scripting languages imaginable.
Sorry, the frustration of living with bash, sh, csh, ksh, tcsh, etc. for
30 years just caused me to convulse and vomit forth the aforementioned
flames ...
Please, Microsoft, not another sh variant. I beg you.
G
Gnu_Raiz
I just wonder if M$ will keep all their arcane dos commands, you know how
annoying it is to move form a *nix to windows platform and have all the
goofy commands not work. You know how many times I have typed ls -l, in
dos just to remember its dir instead.
Man maybe you need some medical counseling, if you hate shells that
much, how did you put up with Windows for this long, especially Windows 98?
I dread to ask the question, of what specifically do you hate about the
bash shell, I find it well documented as well as any GNU software, just go
to gnu.org read up on it. I know that some people just hate CLI, but then
again I don't have a problem with it, but then again I think using emacs,
and vim are pretty cool, I don't know what I would do without xterm.
As the old joke goes what is Xwindows used for? It used to switch between
xterms! That kind of sums up what kind of a user I am, I love pipes,
find, and grep if M$ has a decent implementation of that then it might be
useful.
As far as feeding the trolls, I am sorry! I just find that gnu.org has
some fine decent documents.
Gnu_Raiz
A
A Jones
Who cares? The DOS batch language is one of the few programming languages
in use that's actually worse than Bash. I'm sure MS will either maintain
backwards compatibility or keep the DOS interpreter around. MS gets
routinely assaulted for its supposed neglect of backwards compatibility,
but all I can say is it's pretty hard to do worse than the fragmentation
under Unix, with a half dozen or more shells, all incompatible, and
all equally bad.
I've always found DOS close to unusable, so I just use a cygwin bash
shell or something else. Bash is bad, but it's usable, just barely,
to do simple things.
The problem with Unix users is that they're almost all advocates, so
they're unable to view the technology critically. That's partly why
Unix systems have fallen so far behind in technology over the past 15
years or so, while competing systems continued to progress. I seem
to be one of the few Unix users who is willing to speak honestly about
the limitations and the great need for improvement.
There's a tiny minority of people who fall in love with typical Unix
technologies X Window, Emacs, and Bash, and are unable or unwilling to
see how much need they have for improvement. This rare kind of person
likes technology, likes being able to tweak their system, and likes being
able to do things in a quick and dirty way. But this kind of person
usually has little appreciation for theoretical issues, abstractions,
soundness, elegance, or even good programming practices.
If you want to understand what's wrong with Bash, all you need to do
is to compare it, with its brief, imprecise, and amateurish
man documentation, its murky semantics, its wacky syntax, its
spaghetti code implementation, with almost any other language in
existence. There is no evidence that the designers and maintainers of
Bash even know much of what's been learned about programming languages
in the past 30 or 40 years. Check out the documentation and specifications for
languages like Java, C#, OCaml, Haskell, Scheme, ..., even
something as purely commercial as Visual Basic, if you want to
see the contrast with more competent efforts. Also, you might want to
visit the scsh web site. Scsh is the only attempt at a shell I know
of by a competent computer scientist.
The other technologies you mention, like X Window, Emacs -- and I'd
add a number others to this list -- are all equally aimed at quick and
dirty use, but are very poorly designed, specified, documented, and
implemented.
F
Franc Zabkar
Yeah, DIRectory makes a lot less sense that ls -l.
- Franc Zabkar
G
Grumble
Franc said:
Can't we all just get along?
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80972 Jul 25 2004 /bin/ls
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80972 Jul 25 2004 /usr/bin/dir
Y
YKhan
A said:
There hasn't been a Bourne Shell script that can't run in bash or ksh.
That's mainly because bash and ksh are descendents or upgrades of
bourne, of course. You can either write to the lowest common
denominator standard which is bourne, or write to one of its upgrades,
giving up on some portability for some extra features.
Yes, csh won't run bourne stuff very well, but it wasn't meant to, it's
a completely different language. Tcsh is csh's descendent.
Whatever.
Yousuf Khan
R
Robert Redelmeier
A Jones said:
You don't seem to make any distinction between a
programming language and a scripting language.
That would apply to many MS-Windows and Apple users moreso.
Progress is not a scalar, it is a vector. There are many
different desireable attributes and different products weigh
them differently. Even MS-Windows has a place.
I can see many improvements possible for Unix. `bash` in
particular seems to have overworked the scripting language and
underworked interactive usability features. 4DOS.EXE has some
nice features, as does `tcsh`.
I love none of these, yet I like Unix and other Linux-like systems.
I have never heard anyone describe the bash manpage as "brief"!
`bash` also has the burden of backwards compatibility
and is a _scripting_ language. I would hate to use any
one of these programming languages interactively.
I did. Sorry, but it uses too many parentheses for quick CLI work.
-- Robert
F
Franc Zabkar
Can't we all just get along?
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80972 Jul 25 2004 /bin/ls
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 80972 Jul 25 2004 /usr/bin/dir
To some extent you can define your own macros using DOSKEY:
doskey ls=dir
Actually I intend to migrate to Linux when Win98se no longer cuts it.
I'm also a big user of the command line and I welcome any move to make
it more powerful and user friendly. In the past I've used several
minicomputer OSes, all with intuitive English CLIs. I've also used
Coherent, but it involved a *lot* of learning, more than I was
prepared to put in at the time. Unix (and its variants) has always
struck me as a cliquey, non-intuitive, boffin's language. I believe
that computing should be an extension of one's normal thought
processes. (That's why I've always avoided calculators that used RPN,
such as those made by HP, preferring calculators that supported
standard algebraic notation.)
Anyway, whether or not you like Bill, at least he has made computing
accessible. Any platform that perpetuates the old elitist us-and-them
relationship should die, IMHO.
FYI, 4DOS has recently become freeware, so a powerful replacement for
command.com and cmd.exe is already available.
- Franc Zabkar
R
Robert Redelmeier
Franc Zabkar said:
Or the `bash` builtin `alias`. Even my retro Slackware comes
configured with `dir` as an alias to `ls`
- , and `ls` itself
to `/usr/bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS` so you can fix whatever options
you want in the env.
It is until you know why things evolved the way they did.
Hint: it was designed for paper teletypes at 110 baud.
Is this flamebait? I always prefered HP RPN calculators for
_precisely_ the same reason. I find multiple nested brackets
a necessary linear convention, but otherwise unintuitive.
I understand equations in terms of what must be grouped
together, often because of units.
Entirely true. His bloatware has driven hardware ever
bigger and faster.
Good. I always liked 4DOS. Tell me, is the source also
available? I'd like to replace `bash`, although I'm sure
it will need mods to do the filename expansion that the unix
shells do, but MS-DOS passes to pgms.
-- Robert
Y
YKhan
Robert said:
I always liked 4DOS too, but I got into a few bad habits with it, like
using the file descriptions, which turned out not to be portable once I
moved from the DOS environment to the Windows one.
Yousuf Khan
T
Tony Hill
Wow.. talk about a blast from the past.. I haven't used Doskey in
ages! Just tested it though, still works in WinXP SP2 though!
Uhh.. did Win98se *EVER* cut it? :>
I've used a number of command lines over the years and never found any
of them to be intuitive. Usable and sometimes very useful, yes, but
definitely not very intuitive.
Now that's even more of a blast from the past! I haven't used 4Dos in
at least 10 years!
A
A Jones
If Gates did anything, he made software a business, and
a profitable one at that. He did not focus first on making
anything accessible. Remember, Microsoft didn't even have
a decent GUI for any of its operating systems until late
1995. It was the last of the non-Unix vendors to get decent
GUI technology. Of course, Linux/Unix is still struggling
to catch up to what MS had in 1995 and everyone else had
even earlier.
As far as producing bloatware that has driven hardware ever
bigger and faster, I don't really see that. Where do you
think hardware would be now if it weren't for Microsoft?
Where should it be? Should we still be running 386's with
1 MB or RAM?
I think hardware and software have evolved together. As
hardware has improved, software developers have been able
to change their paradigms by writing less efficient but
more powerful and more easily maintainable code. That's
basically a good thing. Software written without high
level abstractions is nasty stuff.
I think Microsoft has been pretty on target in terms of writing
software to the hardware that would be current at ship time.
A lot of other companies have been much less successful. One
of the reasons OS/2 faltered is that IBM was releasing versions
that needed 16MB of RAM at a time when 2 or 4 MB was the norm.
Windows 3.1 was pretty happy with 2 or 4 MB or RAM, and Windows
95 could get by with 8MB. NeXT was even worse. And the OpenDoc
component system was another case. It needed 32 MB or more
at a time when 8 and 16 MB was the norm, and OLE (or whatever
MS was calling it at the time) required far less. (Well, they
never quite got OpenDoc working right either). Too bad. It's
been 10 or 15 years now that Microsoft has been the only
significant company with working desktop component technology.
Some companies went the other direction, spending too much
time writing low level code. That might have been part of
the Amiga's problem.
As far as the current situation goes, I think it's pretty
clear that current Linux distributions are by far the most
inefficient and resource hungry systems ever created. The system
I'm on now (Linux Fedora Core 2) just doesn't run well with
less than 512 MB of RAM, and it needs at least 768 if I
want to avoid excessive swapping when I have a lot of Firefox
tabs and other stuff going at once. That's a far cry from
the 8 or 16 MB Win 95 used to need, and it's 3 or 4 times
what my Win2000 and Win XP systems need.
A
A Jones
A scripting language is a kind of programming language.
Bash is reminiscent of BASIC. I think of it sort of as
BASIC's crazy uncle. It's got a weird and limited set
of data structures, weird and limited looping constructs,
a weird and limited notion of function, etc. BASIC itself
is pretty mediocre, but writing for its crazy uncle Bash
is pretty unpleasant.
The sad thing about Unix is that the technical incompetence
of its developers not only makes for lousy technology,
but also blinds its users to the need for improvement. They think
weird things, like a scripting language isn't a real programming
language, so you don't need to know anything about programming
languages to create it. They think they can write things like
that by the seat of their pants, knowing nothing about computer
science, or even being that good at programming. And they end up
congratulating themselves for the superb job they've done, because they
don't know enough to realize that they should be working within the
framework of 4 decades of programming language research. In that
tradition, the crazy uncle of one of the lousiest languages to
survive from the 1960's wouldn't count for much, but in the
Unix world, it's treated with reverence, like it's some
powerful and ingenious invention. So you've got these technically
incompetent folks, who know nothing about computer science,
who are even more clueless about usability and marketing,
calling each other gurus and congratulating themselves for
knowing more than the folks in Redmond.
And what you end up with, is the Unix people let BASIC's crazy uncle
out of the attic, and made him run a big part of the Unix
show. And the other parts of the show are run by the other
loony systems, like X Window and Emacs, which are designed
with equal technical incompetence.
R
Robert Redelmeier
A Jones said:
Yes, but it has _very_ different design objectives from
traditional [compiled] programming languages. Fundamentally
designed for easy automation of command sequences by the typers
(not traditional programmers). No large memory structures.
It is meant for very short programs. A long script is as
much a misuse as "Hello, World" is in `c`.
Wierd to you. Not necessarily to everyone. I think of BASIC much
the same as I think of MS-Windows. Seductively easy to learn,
but very limited (or contortions required) and not really to be
used beyond an introductory course or for very limited needs.
You are not the only person to dislike the Bourne shell. Many
people did, and starting very early on. `csh` was developed and
is the "primary" shell of *BSD systems. Others went in direction
of the Korn shell. Nothing stops you from working in the Scheme
shell if your work is original and valuable enough.
Flamebait. Please moderate your language if you wish me to respond.
-- Robert
R
Robert Redelmeier
A Jones said:
Of course not. But he wanted ever-more sales, and the
Invisible Hand forced him in the direction of accessibility.
An interesting speculation. How many PCs would be sold at
$5000 today. If attractiveness (eye candy) and mass marketting
hadn't driven the price down to one-tenth? Perhaps only one
tenth. That would then have justified far less development.
News to me. I thought the main reason OS/2 faltered was
Billy got in a huff and left with the UI with him. He
split the project, and took the market.
Maybe 4 without many apps open. Not 2.
Very badly. It was designed for 16, and ran much better in 32+.
I don't know what your problem is. I run Slackware fine on
an old 486sx laptop with 8 MB (no GUI). My main machine
has an excessive 512 MB, I run it swapless and I still get:
$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515376 480772 34604 0 28904 199236
-/+ buffers/cache: 252632 262744
Swap: 0 0 0
with Mozilla, Citrix & bash running under KDE. It ran fine
swapless with 256 MB, and I'd expect it to run OK at 128 or
maybe 64 MB with swap.
-- Robert
A
A Jones
The story of OS/2 is a long one. IBM and MS were working on it
together, but MS was responsible for "advanced kernel development,"
so they were doing all the kernel stuff. IBM was doing the GUI.
What happened is that MS continued working on the DOS/Windows line
more or less behind IBM's back. Then, when Windows 3.1 hit the scene,
it was an unexpected smashing commercial success. The technology
was terrible, much worse than OS/2. The success was because it could run
in, let's say, 4 MB RAM, and it could run a lot of DOS software without
too much fuss. Bill didn't get in a huff, he just realized he was
holding all the cards. He decided to take the Windows 3.1 market, which
was in his hands, and shepherd it to Windows 95 and Windows NT, and dump
IBM.
OS/2 had a very nice GUI. It was a little drab in appearance, but
functionally it was powerful and slick. I would say the OS/2
GUI was more advanced 10 or 12 years ago than Gnome is today,
and OS/2 could run happily in 16 MB RAM rather than 512 or whatever
you think Gnome needs.
I generally have Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird (or Evolution), XEmacs,
some terminals, and maybe a newsreader open. With 512MB, I could squeak
by most of the time, but too many Firefox tabs, or opening a pdf viewer,
or something, and bang, I was swapping like crazy. In my
experience, Windows 2000 and XP take a lot less memory for a similar
setup. In fact, I can get by with Windows 2000 running on 128 MB of
RAM. There's no way on earth I could ever get a RH system with Gnome
to run decently in that, or even 168 MB RAM -- not even close. Nor
will I ever waste the hours and hours of my life fiddling around trying
to get it to. If you've had better success, good. Enjoy.
F
Franc Zabkar
IIRC TI calculators used a 9-level stack, albeit a hidden one. In fact
one could access the stack on a TI-59 using undocumented instructions.
So it's clear that TI machines *evaluated* the expressions in the same
way as HP calculators, it's just that TI calculators *accepted*
expressions as they were written. No mental gymnastics were required.
I certainly didn't have to learn a new way of doing things.
Furthermore, the often touted claim that HP calculators were much more
economical with keystrokes was a myth which I disproved many a time.
Not AFAIK, although this page suggests that it may go open source
someday:
http://www.4dos.info/v4dos.htm
The actual v7.50 binaries are here:
http://www.4dos.info/4dvers/4dos750b130.exe
.... or here:
ftp://jpsoft.com/4dos/files/
- Franc Zabkar
F
Franc Zabkar
IIRC TI calculators used a 9-level stack, albeit a hidden one. In fact
one could access the stack on a TI-59 using undocumented instructions.
So it's clear that TI machines *evaluated* the expressions in the same
way as HP calculators, it's just that TI calculators *accepted*
expressions as they were written. No mental gymnastics were required.
Furthermore, the often touted claim that HP calculators were much more
economical with keystrokes was a myth which I disproved many a time.
In any case, whether or not RPN is better than algebraic is
irrelevant. My contention is that a person should not have to adapt to
technology, but that technology should adapt to him. For example, I
should be able to pick up any unfamiliar calculator and key in "1+2=",
not the counterintuitive "1 Enter 2 +". The inner workings should be
transparent to the user interface.
Not AFAIK, although this page suggests that it may go open source
someday:
http://www.4dos.info/v4dos.htm
The actual v7.50 binaries are here:
http://www.4dos.info/4dvers/4dos750b130.exe
.... or here:
ftp://jpsoft.com/4dos/files/
- Franc Zabkar