RE: From DOS to lambda calculus: new functional MS shell

>"... the shell provides consistency... through the use of a single parser,
> rather than relying on each command to create its own parser for
parameters."



TOPS-20 & Twenex had this in the exec (shell) as well.  It was very
convenient.

 

It's funny how you can miss things from operating systems that have been
commercially dead for well over 20 years.

 

-reilly hayes

 

  _____  

From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of K Kelleher
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 6:12 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ll-discuss] From DOS to lambda calculus: new functional MS
shell

 

Being a veteran Microsoft hater, I was skeptical of the new Microsoft shell,
but I have to admit they did a good job of it.  However, it doesn't make
sense for any platform except Windows.

They see the Unix shells as being "text based" -- that each command gives
its output as text
that can be (among other things) used as the input of another command.  MSH
is different
in that the basis for interaction between the OS and the individual commands
is
object based.  The commands are passing objects to each other.  Those
objects
can be .Net objects or CLR objects, or other Microsoft OS objects.  And they
have tried to be uniform in naming the elements of those objects.  They also
say this:  
You can make anonymous functions, and functions that act as filters or
iterators.
If you use named parameters, you need only use enough of the name to
uniquely
identify that parameter (for example, -s could be enough to stand for the
parameter
name "second").  Also, you don't need to define the number of parameters
that
a function takes: you can simply read them off the argument array.

It also gives direct access to parts of the registry -- again, something
that
only makes sense on the windows platform.

All in all, it's a big step toward making Windows a serious work
environment.

Kevin Kelleher