From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,e219d94b946dfc26 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!news.germany.com!news.solace.miun.se!news.solace.miun.se!newspeer1.se.telia.net!se.telia.net!masternews.telia.net.!newsb.telia.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rn?= Persson Subject: Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <45dcaed8_6@news.bluewin.ch> <1172132169.423514.271890@s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com> <1172257457.802242.307050@j27g2000cwj.googlegroups.com> <1172259022.144832.81680@8g2000cwh.googlegroups.com> User-Agent: KNode/0.10.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit Message-ID: <5oMDh.34648$E02.13633@newsb.telia.net> Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 01:18:57 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 83.251.159.188 X-Complaints-To: abuse@telia.com X-Trace: newsb.telia.net 1172279937 83.251.159.188 (Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:18:57 CET) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:18:57 CET Organization: Telia Internet Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9474 Date: 2007-02-24T01:18:57+00:00 List-Id: 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