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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards
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From: Markus E Leypold
 <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>
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Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:27:32 +0100
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"Hyman Rosen" <hyman.rosen@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mar 6, 7:56 am, Georg Bauhaus <bauh...@futureapps.de> wrote:
>> When it comes to echo *.ads, a decision was necessary as to what
>> should happen when there is no matching file name. The choice was
>> not: reflect this fact and produce the empty result. This might
>> have had other consequences somewhere else. Instead, it
>> was to produce the pattern itself--which is very different from
>> a file name.
>
> One of those other consequences is that many, if not most, UNIX
> programs treat a no-argument command as meaning "do your default
> action". So 'ls' with no directory arguments lists the current
> directory and 'cat' with no file arguments reads standard input, and
> so forth. If I wrote 'cat *.ads' and there were no such files and the
> shell expanded that to nothing, 'cat' would sit endlessly awaiting
> input from the terminal. As it stands, I get 'cat: cannot open *.ads'
> and I see the problem. What we have is a design that works pretty well
> interactively and pretty well in scripts, failing only on a few weird
> cases. That's good enough, because it gets you to 90% of what you
> need, and Worse is Better.

No, worse is not better, but shell script is, strictly spoken, not a
programming language but a interactive command language.

Regards -- Markus