Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Adam Beneschan wrote:

> But as has been said several times before, the OS could have provided
> a service that could have been called iteratively to return the file
> names, one at a time.  That's how VMS does it.  This arrangement would
> solve both the problems you mention above---keeping the applications
> small and simple, and allowing for new types of wildcards without
> having to change the application.

It would keep applications small only with the help of dynamic linking,
which early Unix didn't have.

And I can assure you that there wouldn't be just one wildcard expansion
library. Different Unix vendors would have slightly different syntaxes,
making the same program behave differently on different Unixes. Then a
number of free software people would want to extend the syntax in various
ways, and would write their own alternate libraries. Programmers would
start using these alternate libraries, not only on Gnu based systems but on
all Unixes, and then the users would have zero chance of keeping track of
which pattern syntax to use for which program.

When the expansion is done in the shell, a user can choose one shell and
learn its syntax. If it were done in each application, all users would have
to use all the syntaxes. Command line syntaxes differ enough as it is.

-- 
Bj�rn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                   omb jor ers @sv ge.
                   r o.b n.p son eri nu